political news and pure bs

By WARREN TERRAH

Published: February 28, 2004

WASHINGTON, DC -- BANGALORE, INDIA -- Feb. 28 -- In a unexpected move, the job of President of the United States has been outsourced to the Bangalore region of India. That the Presidential tasks and title were being considered for outsourcing has been a closely guarded secret according to White House officials speaking on condition of anonymity.

One official said, "It's been in the works for some time now. We felt the time was right as we needed to move the Chief Executive position to an individual with something of a command of the English language."

Asked if President's Bush's polling numbers were in part reason for the change, another Senior staffer told us, "Polling numbers? No. Not at all. His polling numbers weren't that bad. It was the fact that, we felt, and still feel, that a person requires a certain level of knowledge to run the world's largest economy, along with the world's most powerful military. We weren't getting the leadership needed to do the job. There was a consensus that something needed to be done, and with outsourcing being all the rage, we get better leadership at less cost. It's a win-win for all of us."

While Vice President Richard Cheney couldn't be reached for comment, sources tell us that he is "cautiously optimistic" about the move, and once he emerges from his undisclosed location, will address the American people concerning the change in Chief Executives.

We reached newly installed U.S. President Rahul Dravid in the new Oval Office East and asked him what does it feel like being the most powerful man on the planet. Sounding somewhat taken aback he replied, "I'm sorry to hear that Mr. Cheney has passed. A great man. He'll be missed and mourned by all."

When we explained that we were talking about President Dravid himself, he quipped, "Oh, of course. I am sorry for Mr. Bush, but happy for the American people. They have been put through a lot over the past three plus years, and a change is precisely the correct medicine for what ails the American psyche."

He went on to ask, "Are you sure Mr. Cheney is well?" We assured him Mr. Cheney is unharmed.

Mr. Bush, already back in Crawford, Texas following the change was upbeat, saying "Yeah. Murrcan's need the best person for the best price."

When asked what he would do with his time now that his job has been moved overseas, he said, "Y'know, if you've been followin' me the past coupla years, I like clearin' brush and stuff. I been talkin' it over with Laura(Mrs. Bush), an' she thinks I should maybe start a, y'know, brush clearin' business."

John Kerry, campaigning in New Delhi New York, was quoted as saying, "The first order of my administration is going to be the re-establishment of the highest office in the land to America. With your help, we can bring the job of President of the United States back to Washington, DC."

In researching this article, we found that President Dravid, in his first official act, signed into law a bill(HR2007) that deprives any government official whose job gets outsourced to any and all future government benefits, including pensions and health care. The new law is retroactive, effectively leaving Mr. Bush without any safety net. He will be given Social Security when he reaches the age of eligibility.

Sources tell us that President Dravid is busy assembling his re-election team. His term is due to elapse in November of this year, as his Presidency is under the same terms as Mr. Bush's. President Dravid has already energized the GOP bloc of unrepentant corporatists, and is wooing American Christians with an initiative designed to reform future oursourcing.

The President's plan is to use church attendance and tithing records in an effort to keep good Christian jobs here in the U.S.

We asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia if this would be allowable under the Constitution's separation clause. Justice Scalia told us, "There is no such clause in the Constitution. America was, and will always be, a Christian nation. I'm glad that President Dravid has taken his God given talent, and brought us a common sense approach to governance." He added, "Why Vishnu is just another name for Jesus."

Democrats in both the House and Senate are reportedly furious over President Dravid's proposal, but said that they will wait and until they have seen the President's initiative before leaping to conclusions.

TEN LINKS SPECIAL EDITION!

Iraq is still a very dangerous place.

Unexploded cluster munitions have caused most of the post-conflict(?) casualties. A hospital director in Najaf said that families were playing with the munitions not knowing what they were. This continues to this day.

So, it looks like the U.S. worst fears are coming home to roost. We are not up to the task of even maintaining law and order, or basic services in post-war Iraq. We were told that we would stay in Iraq as long as it takes for democracy to take hold in Iraq. Iraq, as it is today, we were told, would not happen.

Let us hope that the people of Iraq, who deserve none of this, will forgive us for the carnage we have inflicted upon them. Let us hope that we have the patience, and the courage to follow through on our promises to the Iraqi people.

Thus far, our record has not been an enviable one.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Treasury Secretary John Snow on Tuesday defended U.S. corporations' right to send U.S. jobs offshore to cheaper-labor countries, and said a more productive source for jobs might be found by breaking down global trade barriers.

Snow was asked on CNBC television whether he would advise U.S. corporations to reduce the rate at which they are "outsourcing" U.S. jobs by having them performed in countries like China and India.

"I think American companies need to do what they need to do to be competitive, and as they're competitive, it's good for their shareholders, it's good for their consumers and it's good for their employees," Snow said.

He added: "Enterprises that don't succeed don't create many jobs."

Snow was interviewed from New York, where he visited Wall Street investment houses and made multiple television appearances repeating that the economy was growing and that as it does so, "lots of jobs are going to be created."

He declined to specify how many jobs might be created, though, and how many of the roughly 2.8 million factory jobs lost since the Bush administration took office might be regained this year.

"I'd like it to be the biggest possible number," Snow said, maintaining his distance from a forecast in the Economic Report to the President earlier this month that 2.6 million jobs could be created this year, comparing this year's average employment with last year's average.

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Dennis Hastert has hardened his opposition to extending the deadline for the independent commission studying the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, even as the panel's leaders pleaded yesterday for more time to complete their work.

Hastert, an Illinois Republican, told Republican lawmakers in a meeting yesterday that he would not bring up any legislation to grant the commission extra time, said spokesman John Feehery. Hastert rejected a personal plea from White House chief of staff Andrew Card on the extension Monday, Feehery said.

"He still doesn't feel the commission needs any extra time and should complete its report as soon as possible," Feehery said, adding that a later deadline also would make the commission "a political issue" during the presidential campaign.

Hastert's stance casts serious doubt on the commission's efforts to secure a 60-day extension of its May 27 deadline, which the panel contends it needs to produce a complete report and avoid cutting back on public hearings. Legislation granting the panel extra time is moving ahead in the Senate, where majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee has indicated his support. After opposing the idea, President Bush reversed himself earlier this month and agreed to support an extension.

By Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Joseph L. Galloway

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Richard Perle, one of the most outspoken advocates for invading Iraq, has quietly resigned from the Defense Policy Board, an influential bipartisan Pentagon advisory group.

Perle informed Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that he was quitting the board in a letter dated Feb. 18, although a week later a Pentagon list of board members still included him. A copy of the letter was obtained by Knight Ridder.

Perle's resignation comes as President Bush, who had hoped to ride popular support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to a second term, finds his administration facing a growing number of congressional, legal and internal investigations into dubious prewar intelligence on Iraq and lucrative contracts for Iraqi reconstruction.

In his letter, Perle said he was resigning after 17 years on the board so that the Bush administration and the Department of Defense would no longer be associated with his outspoken views on Iraq and other matters.

"We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which I have strong views will be widely discussed and debated," Perle wrote. "I would not wish those views to be attributed to you or the president at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign."

Perle didn't return a telephone call seeking comment on his resignation, and a Pentagon spokesman would confirm only that he had resigned.

In recent weeks, Perle has called for the resignation of CIA Director George Tenet, criticized Secretary of State Colin Powell and other current and former senior U.S. officials as "soft-liners" and urged the Bush administration to consider pulling out of the United Nations if the agency doesn't legalize pre-emptive attacks on states that harbor terrorists.

Perle also is a prominent supporter and close friend of Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council who's the subject of a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into exaggerated and fabricated intelligence about Iraqi weapons programs and ties to Osama bin Laden.

In the run-up to the invasion, Perle advocated installing Chalabi as Iraq's interim leader, and he told Knight Ridder in a July 2003 interview that CIA and State Department opposition to this plan led to the insurgency against the U.S.-led occupation.

• a bomb exploded Thursday near a police car in Baquoba, killing one policeman, injuring four others and damaging four police vehicles.



• A homemade bomb Thursday damaged an oil and gas line running between Beiji and Baghdad, a member of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps told The Associated Press.



• On Wednesday, a U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa helicopter crashed into the Euphrates River, killing its two pilots. Sanchez, the U.S. commander, said the helicopter clipped a power line and was not brought down by hostile fire. The pilots' deaths brought to 547 the number of American service members who have died since the Iraq war began on March 20. Most of the deaths have occurred since President Bush declared an end to active combat May 1.

The former Vermont governor said the Democratic Party should "not paper over its differences with the most radical administration in our lifetime," according to remarks prepared for delivery Thursday to supporters in New Haven, Conn.

"In order to win, the Democratic Party must aggressively expose the ways in which George W. Bush's policies benefit the privileged and the most extreme ideologues," said Dean, who plans to start a political organization that will promote grass-roots democracy and support candidates who favor progressive policies such as universal health care.

Dean plans to announce details about the organization March 18.

Dean also urged his supporters to stay with the Democratic Party and warned them not to be tempted by independent or third-party candidates, a reference to Ralph Nader's independent run for president.

"I will do everything I can to ensure that the 2004 Democratic nominee runs as a true progressive, as a champion of working Americans and their hopes for a better future," Dean said. "Because -- I will say it again -- that is the way to win in 2004."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - American seniors are keenly interested in the new Medicare bill signed into law last December, but more than two-thirds are confused about it, according to a survey released on Thursday.
The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows just 15 percent of people over 65, who will be most affected by the new prescription drug law, understand it very well. And the younger general public understands it even less well.

The new bill added prescription drug coverage to Medicare, the government's health care plan for older Americans, and boosted the roles of private health maintenance organizations and the drug industry.

Nearly 70 percent of those polled did not understand that it was a bill passed in Congress and signed into law by President Bush, the nonprofit research group said.

"The lack of understanding of the prescription drug law makes it ripe for political demagoguery on both sides as we enter the election season," Kaiser President Drew Altman said in a statement.

"The president will say he delivered a good prescription drug law and the Democratic candidate will say it's a bad law. How are seniors to judge?"

Both sides have launched advertising campaigns about the law, with many Democrats complaining the federal government's ads amount to political campaign. They have asked the General Accounting Office, the investigational arm of Congress, to check.

Princeton Survey Research Associates International called 1,201 adults for the survey, including 237 over 64.

They found that 49 percent of all adults and 64 percent of seniors said they had followed the Medicare prescription drug debate "very closely" or "somewhat closely."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday a state scholarship plan that barred theology students from participating is not unconstitutional.

The justices by a 7-2 vote rejected a Washington state student's claim that he was being treated unfairly because of his major.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist said, "Given the historic and substantial state interest at issue, we therefore cannot conclude that the denial of funding for vocational religious instruction alone is constitutionally suspect."

[Here's a bit of Tony "Dick's huntin' buddy" Scalia's dissenting opinion. Ed.]

"Let there be no doubt: This case is about discrimination against a religious minority."

"I'm a little disappointed in our chief executive -- who nobody ever accused of being a deep thinker -- for popping off."

"The more you know about something, the more difficult it gets sometimes."

"I've been a judge for 47 years and I've been called everything, so it doesn't bother me. It comes with the territory."

"If the court makes a decision someone likes, it's applauded as 'judicial statesmanship.' If not, it's called 'judicial activism.' "

In his testimony before the Budget Committee, Greenspan said the current deficit situation, with projected record red ink of $521 billion this year, will worsen dramatically once the 77 million members of the baby boom generation start becoming eligible for Social Security benefits in just four years.

He said projections show the country will go from having just over three workers supporting each retiree to 2.25 workers for every retiree by 2025.

"This dramatic demographic change is certain to place enormous demands on our nation's resources - demands we will almost surely be unable to meet unless action is taken," Greenspan said. "For a variety of reasons, that action is better taken as soon as possible."

He said taking action now would mean that people still working would have time to adjust their retirement savings plans to deal with smaller Social Security benefits.

Greenspan said at some point the country needed to face the fact that the government has promised more in entitlement benefits than it can afford to pay. He said the problem was even worse for Medicare because it was impossible to estimate what types of costly medical advances will be available in coming years.

He did not mention that Congress late last year, at Bush's urging, adopted a new prescription drug benefit as part of a Medicare overhaul now estimated to cost $540 billion over the next decade.

"I am just basically saying that we are overcommitted at this stage," Greenspan said in response to committee questions. "It is important that we tell people who are about to retire what it is they will have." He warned that the government should not "promise more than we are able to deliver."

While the country is currently enjoying the lowest interest rates in more than four decades, Greenspan warned that financial markets will begin pushing long-term rates higher if investors do not see progress in dealing with the projected huge deficits that will occur once baby boomers begin retiring.

As he has in the past, Greenspan called on Congress to reinstitute rules that require any future tax cuts or spending increases to be paid for either by spending cuts in other areas or increases in other taxes. Bush has called for the rules to cover only spending increases, not tax cuts.

Confounding President Bush's pledges to rein in government growth, federal discretionary spending expanded by 12.5 percent in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, capping a two-year bulge that saw the government grow by more than 27 percent, according to preliminary spending figures from congressional budget panels.

The sudden rise in spending subject to Congress's annual discretion stands in marked contrast to the 1990s, when such discretionary spending rose an average of 2.4 percent a year. Not since 1980 and 1981 has federal spending risen at a similar clip. Before those two years, spending increases of this magnitude occurred at the height of the Vietnam War, 1966 to 1968.

The preliminary spending figures for 2003 also raise questions about the government's long-term fiscal health. Bush administration officials have said fiscal restraint and "pro-growth" tax cuts should put the government on a path to a balanced budget. Bush has demanded that spending that is subject to Congress's annual discretion be capped at 4 percent.

But the Republican-led Congress has not obliged. The federal government spent nearly $826 billion in fiscal 2003, an increase of $91.5 billion over 2002, said G. William Hoagland, a senior budget and economic aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Serial Reline Killer). Military spending shot up nearly 17 percent, to $407.3 billion, but nonmilitary discretionary spending also far outpaced Bush's limit, rising 8.7 percent, to $418.6 billion.

Eliminating Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network will not end the danger to Americans from a growing Islamic extremist movement, CIA Director George Tenet warned Tuesday.

Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that new groups inspired by bin Laden, his followers and their methods "have become the next wave of the terrorist threat. Dozens of such groups exist."

"We must overcome a movement, a global movement infected by al-Qaida's radical agenda" of attacking the United States with weapons capable of causing mass casualties, he said.

Even if bin Laden and his network are eradicated, other Islamic extremist groups will continue attacking targets overseas and in the United States for years to come, Tenet warned.

Al-Qaida has "infected others with its ideology, which depicts the United States as Islam's greatest foe," he said. "The steady growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-U.S. sentiment through the wider Sunni extremist movement and the broad dissemination of al-Qaida's destructive expertise ensure that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future - with or without al-Qaida in the picture."

Those inspired by bin Laden include the al Zarqawi network, active in Iraq; Ansar al Islam, an Iraqi Kurdish organization; and groups in Libya, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Somalia and other Asian and African countries.

"These far-flung groups increasingly set the agenda and are redefining the threat we face," he said. "They are not creatures of bin Laden, and so their fate is not tied to his. They have autonomous leadership. They picked their own targets. They plan their own attacks."

The threat, Tenet said, goes beyond these groups to individual "jihadists," or holy warriors, who see the presence of 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq as a "golden opportunity."

Jacoby warned that a failure of U.S. policy in Iraq could turn the country into "a training ground for the next generation of terrorists."

He said he was concerned about trends in the Muslim world that bode badly for the United States and Arab governments that are close to Washington.

Poverty, corruption, joblessness among large numbers of young people and poor education are combining with opposition to U.S. policies to threaten the stability of pro-U.S. regimes and create "a terrorist threat to the United States for years to come," he said.

"Favorable ratings (for the United States) in Morocco declined from 77 percent in 2000 to 27 percent in spring of last year, and in Jordan from 25 percent in 2002 to only 1 percent in May 2003," Jacoby said in a statement submitted to the committee.

Posted on Sun, Feb. 22, 2004

Officials: U.S. still paying millions to group that provided false Iraqi intelligence

WASHINGTON - The Department of Defense is continuing to pay millions of dollars for information from the former Iraqi opposition group that produced some of the exaggerated and fabricated intelligence President Bush used to argue his case for war.

The Pentagon has set aside between $3 million and $4 million this year for the Information Collection Program of the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, led by Ahmed Chalabi, said two senior U.S. officials and a U.S. defense official.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because intelligence programs are classified.

The decision not to shut off funding for the INC's information gathering effort could become another liability for Bush as the presidential campaign heats up and, furthermore suggests that some within the administration are intent on securing a key role for Chalabi in Iraq's political future.

Chalabi, who built close ties to officials in Vice President Cheney's office and among top Pentagon officials, is on the Iraqi Governing Council, a body of 25 Iraqis installed by the United States to help administer the country following the ouster of Saddam Hussein last April.

The former businessman, who lobbied for years for a U.S.-backed military effort to topple Saddam, is publicly committed to making peace with Israel and providing bases in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East for use by U.S. forces fighting the war on terrorism.

Some of the INC's information alleged that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program, which was destroyed by U.N. inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War, and was stockpiling banned chemical and biological weapons, according to the letter.

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by Knight Ridder, said the information went directly to "U.S. government recipients" who included William Luti, a senior official in Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office, and John Hannah, a top national security aide to Cheney.

The letter appeared to contradict denials made last year by top Pentagon officials that they were receiving intelligence on Iraq that bypassed established channels and vetting procedures.

The State Department and the CIA, which soured on Chalabi in the 1990s, viewed the INC's information as highly unreliable because it was coming from a source with a strong self-interest in convincing the United States to topple Saddam.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has concluded since the invasion that defectors turned over by the INC provided little worthwhile information, and that at least one of them, the source of an allegation that Saddam had mobile biological warfare laboratories, was a fabricator. A defense official said the INC did provide some valuable material on Saddam's military and security apparatus.

Even so, dubious INC-supplied information found its way into the Bush administration's arguments for war, which included charges that Saddam was concealing illicit arms stockpiles and was supporting al-Qaida.

No illicit weapons have yet been found, and senior U.S. officials say there is no compelling evidence that Saddam cooperated with al-Qaida to attack Americans.

The Information Collection Program is now overseen by the DIA, the Pentagon's main intelligence arm, which took over when the State Department decided to give it up in late 2002.

The defense official defended the current support of the INC effort, saying that it has been of some help to the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, a team that is trying to determine what happened to Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

INC-supplied informants also have identified insurgents who have been waging a guerrilla war that has claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. troops and hundreds of Iraqis, he said.

"To call all of it (INC intelligence) useless is too negative," said the defense official, who described the Information Collection Program as a "massive" undertaking.

"You never take anything at face value," he continued. "When the INC gives information, we absolutely pursue it. You never know what that golden nugget is going to be."

But a senior administration official questioned whether the United States should still be funding the program.

"A huge amount of what was collected hasn't panned out," he said. "Some of it has turned out to have been either wrong or fabricated."

The senior administration official also sought to justify the initial decision to support the program.

Prior to the invasion, U.S. intelligence agencies had no better human sources in Iraq, and had no choice but to rely on the INC, minority Kurdish guerrilla groups and other sources who claimed to have knowledge of Saddam's illegal arms programs, ties to terrorist groups and his military forces, he said.

"The evidence now suggests that at some points along the way, we may have been duped by people who wanted to encourage military action for their own reasons," he conceded.

Chalabi apparently is less concerned about the past

"We are heroes in error," Chalabi was quoted as saying recently in Baghdad by The Daily Telegraph of London. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

In a related development, U.S. officials said that on top of the Pentagon funds, Chalabi's organization asked the State Department in August for $5 million in unspent financing that was approved by Congress before the war.

By Jill Zuckman
Tribune national correspondent

February 24, 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Outside the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters union hall, a scraggly band of young Republicans stood in the cold, waving their "Hanoi John" and "Bush-Cheney" signs at Sen. John Kerry's motorcade.

As Kerry closes in on the Democratic nomination for president, the Bush campaign has begun to try to portray him as a Massachusetts liberal, a hypocrite who switches positions for political expedience and a disloyal war protester from the hippie era.

"John Kerry is out of sync with most Americans, whether it's raising taxes or providing for a strong national defense," said Terry Holt, a senior official with the Bush campaign. "He's voted against every significant weapons system at work in Iraq and in the war on global terror. . . . Yes, he's liberal, but maybe more disturbing is that he's a phony."

It is an approach that worked famously before in the 1988 campaign of Bush's father against former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Kerry has vowed that the strategy will not work again.

In a culture often given to ready caricature, however, resisting that label might be more difficult than Kerry thinks, especially because the Bush campaign will have more than $150 million in its coffer before the national political conventions this summer.

Kerry says he refuses to be branded, and he insists that his record is too complex to be susceptible to simplistic tags like `Massachusetts liberal.'

"I laugh at that," Kerry said in Oklahoma City recently. "The American people deserve something more than labels. What they want is leadership, and they're going to look me in the eye, all Americans are, and they'll make a judgment about my character and they will look at my record."

Combing Kerry's record

Indeed, officials within the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee are looking closely at Kerry's record, even though he has not yet clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. They plan to back up their assertions using the lawmaker's votes--a total of 6,320--over the past 19 years in the Senate. They say his actions in the Senate will show him to be cozy with lobbyists and special interest groups, soft on defense and inconsistent when it comes to intelligence funding, gay marriage and the Iraq war.

"John Kerry has one of the longest legislative records in the United States Senate and it's significantly to the left of where the American public is," said Tom Rath, the Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire. "It's really not playing dirty when you simply remind people of somebody's voting record."

On Monday, Kerry said in New York that he does consider attacks on his voting record an assault on his patriotism. The senator noted he voted for the largest defense spending increase in history, and Republicans want to portray him as weak and "that's the game they play."

Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Kerry, said that legislative record includes his votes for welfare reform, defense spending and deficit control. His vocal support for the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings plan to balance the budget with automatic spending cuts if certain spending targets were not reached was a controversial one for a New England Democrat who was new to the Senate in 1985.

"He is not definable in the way Republicans want to define him," Cutter said.

Kerry's campaign is creating a rapid response team to contend with GOP attacks, and officials say the Republican broadsides are only half the story.

"We're ready to tell the truth about George Bush's failed policy," said Cutter. "He says he's strong on defense, but America is not stronger today than it was 3 1/2 years ago. He's not strong on the economy. Each step of the way, he says he's going to create 2 million jobs, and he's not been able to produce it."

Already, the Bush campaign has begun targeting Kerry as he stumps for votes. The day before Democratic front-runner traveled to the Ohio cities of Dayton and Columbus last week, Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a key player in the Bush-Cheney orbit, held a conference call with reporters to defend the president's economic policies.

Kerry campaign officials quickly fought back by producing two Ohio mayors to talk of devastating job losses and plant closings in their cities during Bush's tenure.

Bush campaign officials say everything is fair game, including Kerry's years as a young anti-war protester.

"We honor John Kerry's service in Vietnam," Holt said. "But it's his record since Vietnam that we would question. Obviously, as a protester, he said some fairly controversial things."

Providing ammunition

One of those things was a 1970 Harvard Crimson interview in which Kerry said U.S. troops should only be deployed at the direction of the United Nations.

"I think the issue is he has advocated a weaker national defense over a long public career," said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign for the Southeast region.

The Conference Board's consumer confidence index plunged to 87.3 in February from a revised 96.4 in January. It's the lowest level since October. Economists expected the Conference Board reading to fall to 92.9 in February from 96.8 January.

Looking forward, the Board's Expectations index sank to 96.8 from 107.8.

"The numbers are not good for the market or the economy in general as they show confidence is waning, especially if you look at the expectations figure," said Peter Cardillo, chief market analyst and strategist at S.W Bach.

FIVE LINKS IS BACK!

Most US policymakers do accept that climate change is a significant threat, a leading British scientist believes. Professor John Schellnhuber, of the University of East Anglia, said he thought about 80% of senior politicians recognised the danger "in principle".

He said he thought this consensus would eventually lead to a change in policy by President Bush's administration.

Professor Schellnhuber was among a UK scientific delegation which held talks on climate recently in Washington DC.[snip]

Professor Schellnhuber said: "We spoke to the Congressional scientific committee, and my feeling is that in principle 80% of the people in Washington who are really informed feel dramatic climate change is a major threat.

"The administration is a prisoner of its own determination not to do anything that would affect the lifestyle of US citizens.

"Perhaps, in a parallel with its stance on Iraq, it has chosen a certain position and will now not alter it for fear of losing face.

"I don't think the US public and policymakers will be happy to go on with a business-as-usual approach for the next five years.

"I'm a scientist, not a politician. But I think the political elite understands pretty well what is going on, and the administration will eventually change."

"He will take on his critics and their backward-looking, failed ideas that would derail our economic recovery and weaken our ability to fight and win the war on terror," said Mr Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman. "The President is going to talk about the choice."

Some White House aides dismissed that poll as an aberration because it was taken after a run of bad news for the president. But they grew concerned when a second poll, released Thursday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, also showed Bush's image slipping.

According to Pew Director Andrew Kohut, that image is "at the low point of his presidency."

The most dramatic evidence of a shift came from poll participants' answers when asked to provide a one-word description of Bush. In a survey in May, positive descriptions outnumbered negative ones by a ratio of almost 2-to-1, Kohut said. In Thursday's poll, the numbers of positive and negative responses were even.

Perhaps most troubling to a president who prides himself on being forthright, the most frequently used negative word to describe Bush was "liar" – a word that never showed up in the May survey, Kohut said.

This all comes at a critical moment for the president's re-election strategy. With Kerry the heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination, the Bush campaign team is poised to launch a multimillion-dollar ad blitz designed to portray the Massachusetts senator as a hypocrite who says one thing but does another.

Looking back on the tactics used in Bush's previous run for the White House, that has almost always been the first move against an opponent showing any strength. When Arizona Sen. John McCain won the New Hampshire primary in 2000, Bush adopted the catchphrase, "John McCain says one thing and does another." Later, in the general campaign, then-Vice President Al Gore got the same treatment.

This time, however, the public's growing unease over Bush's trustworthiness makes the use of such a tactic more complicated.

↓ Comments Here! ↓

Intel said the IRS proposed certain adjustments related to Intel's tax benefits on export sales following the examination, which occurred in August. The IRS has yet to issue a formal assessment on the matter.

Intel said it disagrees with the IRS and will use appeal procedures, if it can.

Also, Intel said the IRS could reach similar decisions in future audits that would concern business results after 2000. Intel said the IRS started last month an examination into tax returns for 2001 and 2002.

If Intel loses its battle with the IRS, the impact to the periods in question would be material, the company said, but that its overall financial position, cash flows or business trends would not be impacted.

"Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?" he asked in a recent interview with USA Today. "It's a nice way to operate, actually."

"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability." - George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998

"There are literally dozens of ways in which to carry out this complicated task, including caucuses, or other kinds of elections -- partial elections."

"We shared with them(the U.S. I presume) our sense that -- and the emerging consensus or understanding -- that elections cannot be held before the end of June, that the June 30 date for the handover of sovereignty must be respected, and that we need to find a mechanism to create a caretaker government and then prepare the elections...........sometime later."

"We have no other choice now. We are in the middle of a process and we cannot have Iraq go in a random direction. The key now is to reach out to more groups, so the people feel we represent them."

"While I haven't seen any news from the U.N., Bremer, or the U.S. Administration, Adnan Pachachi -- whom Bush praised in both his SOTU address and during his hour long chat with Tim Russert on Meet The Press -- declared yesterday that "the caucuses have been discarded."

"Now the Americans have to stay away. Anything we do, we have to be able to defend in front of our people."

Nedra Pickler
Disassociated Press

WASHINGTON, Feb. 19 - Following the release of a statement critical of a highly sensible Bush policy to add additional layers of pro-industry peer review to the scientific process, 20 Nobel Laureates, as well as 19 other prominent members of the scientific community are being held on what hunky Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is calling "Weapons of Mass Destruction Knowledge."

Mr. Wolfowitz said at a press conference following the arrests; "We know that these people have the knowledge, skill and chutzpah to create and tactically use weapons banned under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty(NNPT), The Chemical weapons Ban(CBC) as well as the Bioweapons Convention(BWTC). Furthermore, many of these so-called distinguished individuals have spent their entire careers thinking about these horrible weapons."

"At this early juncture, it is too early to tell just how far the thought processes of these individuals went, but rest assured this is a vital blow to those who harbor terrorists, to the countries that support their work, and to the thought processes of those that harbor thoughts and views which differ materially from the rubber-stamped thoughts of goodness that emanate from the White House.

"I can also divulge at this time that is a definite link between the horrific events of 9-11 and many of these men. Long time White House reporter Helen Thomas, asked if my dumpling the dignified Deputy could "add some color" to his statement about the 9-11 connection. In a truly manly display he responded, with chest puffed, "Aren't you supposed to be in the back row?" and motioned for a secret service member to remove her from the room. She was escorted out the door hastily.

Another reporter covering the story asked Deputy Wolfowitz, if the scientists "had actually been found with any banned materials". Paul Deputy Wolfowitz magnificently responded, "What is it about America that you hate so very much?"

The reporter, visibly shaken, meekly replied; "Don't you recognize me? I'm George Bush. 'George H.W. Bush.'"

"Never heard of you, Bush. However you do look remotely familiar," deputy Love Buns Wolfowitz superhumanly answered.

"No further questions. Thank you for attending," my stallion Mr. Wolfowitz roared as he stepped from the dais and concluded the meeting.

Then he looked my way and winked. I had trouble removing myself from the seat.

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

President Bush's plan for clarifying the causes and effects of climate change has been improved over the past year but can succeed only if the research is shielded from political pressures and if more money is spent on it, an independent panel of experts said yesterday.

Administration officials, who requested the outside review of the plan, welcomed the findings, but said no significant budget increases were possible. They said climate research goals would be met mainly through improved organization.

"We can't practically expect short-term massive increases in funding; it's just not in the cards these days," said James R. Mahoney, an assistant secretary of commerce who directs the Climate Change Science Program.

The federal government currently spends about $1.7 billion a year on climate research, officials said, and there are no significant shifts in spending in the administration's 2005 budget.

The panel, assembled by the National Research Council of the National Academies, the country's leading scientific advisory group, said there was an urgent need to move from planning an expanded push in federal climate research to financing it and moving ahead.

"This is an issue where the science is pretty clearly telling us that the longer we wait to consider some of these issues, the more dramatic the impacts may turn out to be," said Thomas E. Graedel, a professor of industrial ecology at Yale and chairman of the 17-member panel.

The administration's plan for climate research is available at www.climatescience.gov, and the critique is at nationalacademies.org.

Mr. Bush first announced plans to intensify climate research in June 2001, shortly after he was criticized by many climate experts for abandoning a campaign pledge to limit power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that many scientists have linked to global warming.

Mr. Bush said more research was needed before he would consider any measures beyond voluntary programs to slow growth in emissions.

The first version of the administration's subsequent research plan was issued in November 2002. It was criticized by the same panel last February as lacking clear priorities and neglecting to take stock of existing studies pointing to risks posed by rising global temperatures. The plan was revised and released last July.

In its review of the revised plan, the panel found clearer goals, but saw few signs that enough money would be allocated for new initiatives like improving satellite observations and computer simulations of the changing atmosphere and oceans.

"There is no evidence in the plan or elsewhere of a commitment to provide the necessary funds for these newer or expanded program elements," the panel said.

It also recommended that the administration ensure the credibility of government climate research by establishing a standing review committee of outside parties with a wide variety of views.

Many environmentalists and political opponents of Mr. Bush, and some scientists at government agencies, have expressed strong concern about the potential for political interference in climate science.

They have cited a string of instances in which the White House has edited climate-related documents in ways that amplified uncertainties and eliminated references to studies pointing to significant risks.

Just before the final version of the research plan was released last summer, for example, senior Commerce Department officials shaping the document threatened to resign over last-minute efforts by senior administration officials to adjust wording, several scientists and officials involved in the dispute said.

Dr. Mahoney said a firm boundary would be maintained between science and policy. "We've got a very clear vision," he said. "Let's get the science right, and the policy gets debated in its own right."

The review panel said the plan's strongest element was its architecture for organizing the dispersed efforts of 13 agencies to focus on a few central goals, including improving knowledge of past and current climate shifts and the influences ? both natural and human ? that shape them and reducing uncertainties in projections of how Earth's climate may shift in coming decades.

"Although the plan was developed for a 10-year time frame, it could effectively guide climate change research for decades," provided it is revised every three to five years to reflect advances in the science, the panel said in a statement.

One of the biggest weaknesses in the administration's plan, the panel said, was the absence of any significant reference to existing research examining the potential effects of climate change around the United States.

Particularly notable, it said, was the omission of any reference to the National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. That 2001 report, done at the request of Congress, was compiled by academic and government scientists over several years.

White House officials have been continually pressed by industry lobbyists and antiregulatory groups to remove references to the assessment from government documents.

The assessment provides "important contributions," the panel said, and the independent peer review it went through was exemplary.

By JAMES GLANZ

More than 60 influential scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, issued a statement yesterday asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad.

The sweeping accusations were later discussed in a conference call organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. On Wednesday, the organization also issued a 38-page report detailing its accusations.

The two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systematically nor on so wide a front," the statement from the scientists said, adding that they believed the administration had "misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies."

Dr. Kurt Gottfried, an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University who signed the statement and spoke during the conference call, said the administration had "engaged in practices that are in conflict with spirit of science and the scientific method." Dr. Gottfried, who is also chairman of the board of directors at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the administration had a "cavalier attitude towards science" that could place at risk the basis for the nation's long-term prosperity, health and military prowess.

....Flanked by a pair of attorneys, Skilling turned himself in at the Houston FBI offices just before daybreak. About 15 minutes later, his hands behind him in cuffs, he was placed in a car for the trip to the federal courthouse in downtown Houston. He was expected to appear later in the day before a federal judge on charges related to Enron's collapse, according to two sources close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Under the circumstances, he is doing extraordinarily well,'' said Dan Petrocelli, one of his lawyers.

Almost exactly two years ago, Skilling bucked the trend of former Enron executives invoking their Fifth Amendment rights before Congress, telling two panels he knew nothing about serious problems at the energy trader before he quit after serving as CEO for only six months.

Barring any last minute delays, Skilling, 50, would be the highest-profile former Enron executive to date to face criminal charges. He would be the 28th individual to be charged and one of the most anticipated in the Justice Department's methodical investigation, which passed its two-year mark last month.

Another of his lawyers, Bruce Hiler, visited the federal courthouse in Houston Wednesday afternoon to familiarize himself with its layout.

Skilling's former boss, Enron founder and former chairman Kenneth Lay, has not been charged, and the sources said it was unclear if he would become a defendant.

Both men, through their lawyers, have maintained their innocence of any wrongdoing related to Enron's failure.

It was not immediately clear what charges Skilling would face, although the sources said they likely would be similar to conspiracy and fraud counts filed last month against former top Enron accountant Richard Causey.

Two years ago, Skilling maintained during testimony before two congressional panels that he believed Enron was financially healthy when he stepped down, citing personal reasons he has not explained.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18 — In the Bush administration, it is considered heresy to suggest postponing the planned return of sovereignty to Iraq. Turning over control by June 30, administration officials say, is crucial to assuaging Iraqi distress over living under American occupation.

Yet in recent weeks, diplomats and even some in the administration have begun to worry that the date reflects more concern for American politics than Iraqi democracy. Their fear is that an untested government taking power on June 30 may not be strong enough to withstand the pressures bearing down on it.

"When we went into Iraq, our plan was to have a government, build a structure and write a constitution that would be a source of longterm stability," said an administration official. "Now that's out the window."

Many in the administration say that while they have no proof that the urgency to install a government is politically motivated, it feels to them like part of a White House plan to permit President Bush to run for re-election while taking credit for establishing self-rule in Iraq.

"I can make all kinds of arguments about why we need to establish democracy in Iraq on an urgent basis," said another administration official. "But when you hear from on high that this is what we must do, and there can be no questioning of it, it sounds like politics."

This week, the administration is in the odd position of insisting on Iraqi self-rule by June 30, while awaiting a recommendation from the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, on how the interim government should be chosen and the form it should take.

Mr. Annan's special envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, went to Iraq to meet with Iraqi leaders, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to work out some sort of consensus on the shape of an interim government.

The United States wants that government to rule while elections are held later in the year or in 2005 for a constitution-writing legislature. Eventually, elections are to be held to ratify the constitution and establish a permanent Iraqi government.

Administration officials say that Mr. Brahimi was told that one option he must not accept is postponement of the June 30 date for the transfer of power.

"It is holy writ," said an administration official.

Yet many experts, including some in the administration, also say they are worried that such a rapid transition entails enormous risks. What happens, some worry, if a major crisis were to occur, resulting from an assassination or bomb explosion in which many Iraqis die?

What happens, moreover, if by accident American forces — which are still likely to retain wide autonomy and authority over security throughout the country — kill a large number of Iraqi citizens? Would a shaky Iraqi government lacking in perceived legitimacy survive a blow like that?

It makes no sense, many experts say, to set a fixed date to hand over sovereignty before having any idea of what sort of government will be given power on that date.

"This is entirely a schedule dictated by Karl Rove," said an Arab diplomat who maintains close contacts with the administration, referring to the White House's political director. "Anyone who thinks otherwise is naive."

"All of this media stuff about John Kerry is just razzmatazz. There isn't any genuine excitement for this guy out there. There are no really excited people for John Kerry because he doesn't affect people that way."

Wow. Rush knows the minds of every Kerry voter. Impressive. We know Bush excites people. The mere thought at his election -- not to be confused with re-election -- has brought Democrats and Independent voters out in recoed numbers in some states. I can back up my statement. The Hot Air Hindenburg cannot. It would be really interesting to know just how many Kerry voters Rush has spoken to...none is a ballpark figure.

"For a year Howard Dean has been trying to take the flag back from me, and he's gotten out of the race before he got my flag. So we'll send him a flag. Get his address in Burlington."

*scanning Nexis* Nope. No mention of any flag here. Your flag wouldn't have a certain symbol of the Third Reich on it would it? I think I can speak for Dean, and say "halten Sie Ihr Markierungsfahnenherrlimbaugh."

"These people who will not take this terrorist threat seriously - who are trying to politicize it and make this the issue over which they seek power - if there were justice, wouldn't get 10% of the vote in
November."

Who exactly are 'these people?' If they are soft on terror why would you want to give them 90% or more of the vote? You did say they don't deserve 10%. 90% sound more like it?

Of course this is a special category of logical fallacy that we at pure bs refer to as: Argumentum ad populum. Simply, appeal to the people. In Rush's special case, it is particularly galling because he has 5 million or so listeners that won't be able, or moved to, get the facts. See: Justice Dept. lawsuit against Ashcroft for "gross mismanagement" in the war on terrorism

Who's not taking the WOT seriously, Rush?

"I'll be honest with you, it's a little depressing to see all of this fringe, wacko and just absolutely off-the-ball stupid stuff being supported or apparently supported by so many people. It really makes you wonder what kind of country we have."

Which stupid stuff? The felonious purchase of thousands of prescription narcotics? Money laundering? Or the abysmal foreign and domestic policies of George W. Bush? I agree. It does make one wonder what kind of country we have.

"I've been trying to do a much better job recently of getting in touch with my feelings, and it's hard, because my whole life I've shoved them away.

Aren't feelings a wonderful thing. I'll give you hint. If you stop lying to others, you may find being more honest with yourself easier. And no more meetings with Kline at Denny's. Those are the first steps.

"With the amount of money we spend on education, when I hear there are parents who can't read, I'm sorry, I don't have sympathy. My fellow citizens and I have paid through the nose to fix this problem since the 1960's, and it sounds like it's only getting worse. Why we say we need another program to deal with this?"

I think the last sentence is supposed to read, "Why do we say we..." I'd say proper sentence structure on the part of multimillionaire shlock jocks is reason enough. (too easy)

But seriously, education in the states is pretty bad. This is typical Limbaugh open ended verbal flatulence. The reason we need different programs is simply because we are falling further behind the rest of the West, and Asia in science and mathematics.

It could be argued that we have a surplus of talk-radio hosts.

For references see Laura Bush.

"It's as I thought. There aren't any credible sources in Maine."

Without context, it's difficult to know what Rush is on about..and that can be chore with context. I think he must still be going on about Edmund Muskie when he was the democratic nominee for VP in 1968..boy time flies when you're jacked up on hill-billy heroin.

"The grinding sound that you hear is the intellectual leader of the left being ground down by the powerful liberal establishment. They just couldn't have Howard Dean run, folks. Howard Dean had to be
destroyed."

No, Rush. That's tinnitus from your uncontrolled opiate binging. "Powerful liberal establishment." Wow. Conspiracy too. PLE: "Taking over a planet near you." I should listen to your show. I have a nice new roll of Alcoa™ aluminum foil with which to construct my listening hat from. Fun!

"I don't hate the government. I just think it's in way too many areas of lives and it's screwing things up instead of the so-called objective being accomplished.

Yeah. I know. It's getting so a guy can't go buying thousands of illegal opiates without coming under suspicion. I guess I'll miss tomorrow's segment on "the so-called objective" of our government. And how about that ACLU, eh? Oh yeah, you need them now. One day Rush's liberal pariah, the next his bedfellow. At least he isn't consistent.

"This was my fantasy last night. Edwards wins in Wisconsin, and this causes a shakeup and a panic throughout the DNC because the DNC is a fluid organization. You have to understand they don't stand for anything other than beating Bush. Whatever it takes to beat Bush that's what they'll be."

Maybe I'm crossing a line here, but Rush Limbaugh and fantasy should never inhabit the same paragraph, much less the same sentence.

I guess his fantasy about Rick Santorum, a Great Dane and overripened bananas didn't come true either.

I hope Rush is correct about the levels that the democrats will go to dethrone King George. The DNC is a fluid organization? What the hell does that mean? I would think it means that they are intellectually nimble. I'm certain Rush means it in some defamatory fashion.

Continuing a decline that has gone on for more than a year, 55% of those surveyed said Bush was honest and trustworthy. That compares to 59% the last time the question was asked in November, and 70% when the question was asked in early January 2003. Sixty-one percent of those surveyed said Kerry was honest and trustworthy.

The poll indicated Americans felt better about Bush the person than they did about his job performance.¹.Majorities said Bush has strong moral character and is a strong and decisive leader² , but less than a majority said Bush generally agrees with them on important issues and has a clear plan for solving the country's problems.³

Oceana, a 2 1/2-year-old nonprofit group, said Google dropped the text-based ads displayed in shaded boxes along the right side of its Web page because they were critical of Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

Washington D.C.-based Oceana believes Royal Caribbean pollutes the oceans by improperly treating the sewage on its ships. It hoped to publicize its complaints by paying to have its ads appear when terms like "cruise vacation" and "cruise ship" were entered into Google's search engine.

The ad, which said "Help us protect the world's oceans," appeared for two days last week before Google pulled it from its page.

When Oceana challenged the ban, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google responded with an e-mail advising the group that it doesn't accept ads with "language that advocates against Royal Caribbean."

Oceana's ad didn't mention Royal Caribbean directly, but the link directed Google visitors to a Web page critical of the Miami-based cruise line.

The decision stunned Oceana because it reeked of censorship and favoritism, said Andrew Sharpless, the group's chief executive.

"We were surprised because the answer they gave certainly raises the question whether they got a phone call from Royal Caribbean," Sharpless said Thursday. "We can't prove that, but it certainly smells that way."

Both Google and Royal Caribbean denied there was any pressure applied to remove the Oceana ad.

Google's policy prohibits ads criticizing other groups or companies, said spokeswoman Cindy McCaffrey. "We do reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site," she said.

BIG TEN IS BACK!

WASHINGTON - The federal prosecutor who won convictions in the government's first and only terrorism trial after the Sept. 11 attacks has filed a lawsuit against Attorney General John Ashcroft accusing the Justice Department of "gross mismanagement" in the war on terrorism.

The highly unusual complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington by Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the conviction of three members of an alleged terrorism sleeper cell in Detroit.

Convertino is facing an internal Justice Department investigation for failing to turn over a document to the defense until long after the trial had ended.

Convertino claims the Justice Department is retaliating against him because he has attacked its efforts in the war on terrorism and cooperated with the Senate Finance Committee, led by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a vocal critic of the department.

In his lawsuit, Convertino said the Justice Department has exaggerated its success in fighting terrorism. He said heavy-handed officials at Justice Department headquarters in Washington have hindered prosecutors in the field.

In the case he handled in Detroit, which Ashcroft has frequently praised as a success in the war on terrorism, Convertino said the government failed to provide the needed federal law enforcement manpower to help review documents, interview witnesses and prepare for trial.

Convertino claims he worked the case for months with the help of only one FBI special agent.

Convertino said he repeatedly asked for additional help.

In the suit, Convertino alleges there was a "lack of support and cooperation, lack of effective assistance, lack of resources and intradepartmental infighting" in terrorism cases.

"These concerns directly related to the ability of the United States to effectively utilize the criminal justice system as a component in the `war on terrorism,' " the lawsuit said.

Astronomers seeking to glimpse the very beginnings of the universe announced this weekend they may have spotted the most distant galaxy yet, one that could shed light on the end of the so-called Dark Ages of cosmology that preceded the well-lit universe we know today.

Nearby galaxy cluster Abell 2218 acts as a powerful lens, magnifying galaxies beyond it. The lensed galaxies are all stretched along the cluster's center and some of them are multiply imaged. The new apparent record-setter shows up as a faint red pair of images, encircled in the larger version of this image.

The scientists are unsure of the exact distance to the galaxy but know it is near the limit of what can be found with current telescopes. It is estimated to be 13 billion light-years away, seen at a time when the universe was just 700 million to 750 million years old.

The newly discovered cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallized carbon 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.) It is 2,500 miles across and weighs 5 million trillion trillion pounds, which translates to approximately 10 billion trillion trillion carats, or a one followed by 34 zeros.

"It's the mother of all diamonds!" says Metcalfe. "Some people refer to it as 'Lucy' in a tribute to the Beatles song 'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.'"

The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 530-carat Star of Africa which resides in the Crown Jewels of England. The Star of Africa was cut from the largest diamond ever found on Earth, a 3,100-carat gem.

The huge cosmic gem (technically known as BPM 37093) is actually a crystallized white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.

For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallized, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.

Women judge the attractiveness other women more harshly when at their most fertile, suggests a new study. The phenomenon could be a strategy to devalue potential rivals, says the psychologist behind the work - being bitchy about others could help a woman win the attention of a desirable man.

Theories of sexual selection in most species usually concentrate on how males compete for females. But recent theories for humans suggest there is intrasexual competition among females as well, as males can vary markedly in their abilities as providers and protectors.

Google Inc. on Tuesday upped the ante in the increasingly competitive search-engine market, announcing that it has increased its venerable Web index to 6 billion Web pages, images and other documents.

In its core search area, Web sites, Google said that it had increased the number of Web pages in its index to 4.28 billion, up from about 3 billion previously. Google's index of images has doubled in size to about 880 million images, said Peter Norvig, Google's director of search quality.

Chip making giant Intel Wednesday said it would begin shipping silicon with the standard, known as 802.16a, or WiMAX by the second half of this year.

In a room full of eager broadband and networking professionals at the Wireless Communications Association (WCA) annual symposium in San Jose, the company said it expects service providers to deploy the standard 2005. So the announcement signals to product designers that they should sit down at their CAD stations and begin thinking about products to roll out next year.

Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Communications Group Sean Maloney said the company's vision includes a three-stage deployment of WiMAX that would begin with fixed outdoor antenna installations to bring wireless to emerging markets and speed the installation of broadband services without the need to lay wire or cable.

"The technology will then rapidly progress to indoor antenna installations, broadening its appeal to carriers seeking simplified installation at user sites," Maloney said. "Finally, in the third phase, WiMAX-Certified hardware will be available in portable solutions for users who want to roam within or between service areas."

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Being physically fit may be good for the aging brain, researchers report.

In a new study of older adults, higher levels of physical fitness were associated with improved mental abilities.

The results highlight the importance of staying in shape, according to one of the study authors.

"Fitness training can enhance brain and mental function," Dr. Arthur F. Kramer, of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Reuters Health.

Even moderate physical activity may keep the brain in tip-top shape, according to Kramer.

"By increased fitness we are not talking about going from a sedentary lifestyle to running a marathon but instead to walking a couple of miles a few times a week," he said.

"Older adults can maintain and indeed enhance cognitive and brain function with modest amounts of aerobic exercise," Kramer said.

"My administration looked at the intelligence information and we saw danger. "Members of Congress looked at the same intelligence, and they saw danger. The United Nations Security Council looked at the intelligence, and it saw danger."

He also revived his assertion that Iraq had become "the central front in the war on terrorism," citing the interception of a letter that American officials have concluded was written by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has long been under scrutiny by the United States for suspected ties to Al Qaeda.

....Limbaugh, his attorneys and the ACLU have argued that the seizure violated Limbaugh's right to privacy and the confidentiality of the relationship between patients and doctors. The attorneys want the state 4th District Court of Appeal to rule that the records should remain sealed.

"What meaning would the patient protections in the Constitution and the law have if prosecutors could disregard them any time they wanted to?" Limbaugh attorney Roy Black said in a statement.

Palm Beach prosecutors seized the records in November for their investigation into whether Limbaugh illegally went "doctor shopping" to obtain pain pills. The crime refers to visiting several doctors to receive duplicate prescriptions of controlled narcotics. Limbaugh sought treatment for his admitted addiction in October and has not been charged with a crime.

Prosecutors had no immediate comment Tuesday but Palm Beach State Attorney Barry Krischer has repeatedly insisted that investigators have followed the law and "scrupulously protected" Limbaugh's rights.

A circuit court has kept the records sealed since investigators obtained the medical records. But prosecutors had a brief opportunity to review the documents Dec. 22 after Palm Beach Circuit Judge Jeffrey A. Winikoff ruled to unseal the records and before Limbaugh's attorneys won a delay to keep them sealed.

The investigation is now on hold until the appeals court rules.

Limbaugh told listeners to his afternoon radio show Tuesday that the investigation "is all political, disguised as a legal case" and that it was a "search- and-destroy mission."

He accused prosecutors of leaking details about the investigation to plant "false stories in the press."

"How many of you people think I was drug trafficking? How many of you people think I was laundering money? Pure leaks," Limbaugh said. "And there's nothing to it."

Limbaugh kept his comments brief, saying, "It's tough for me to talk about it. I mean, I can, but it's uncomfortable for me to do so."

Prosecutors have drawn criticism for other actions in the case. Last month, the state Attorney General's office questioned the motives of Krischer and his staff after they released letters from Black about negotiating a guilty plea. Prosecutors cited support from the Attorney General's office and the Florida Bar, but both groups contradict those claims.

Krischer's office began investigating more than a year ago after his former maid, Wilma Cline, told them she sold Limbaugh "large quantities of hydrocodone, Oxycontin and other pharmaceutical drugs" for years. She provided investigators with e-mails and answering machine recordings to support her claims......

Most members of the Iraqi Governing Council have said they no longer support a U.S. plan for choosing an interim government before power is handed over later this year. The U.S. coalition says it is opposed to any plan to include Islamic law in an interim constitution.

Most members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed governing council have said they no longer support a U.S. plan they endorsed last November that calls for regional meetings to choose an interim government.

Several council members, representing Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Kurds, say the caucus system is too controversial. Some back a proposal for the U.S.-led coalition to hand power to the current Governing Council until elections can be held. Others have suggested a national conference of political and religious figures from which a new leadership would emerge.

The current plan has been in question for some time and was one aspect being scrutinized by a U.N. fact finding team that visited Iraq last week. The team all but ruled out the possibility of early elections.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Shi'ite groups have criticized comments by U.S. top administrator Paul Bremer who, they say, would oppose any use of Islamic law as the basis of Iraq's new constitution. The coalition says this was part of a long-standing agreement the United States has had with the Iraqi council.

"It is not Ambassador Bremer's position, it is the position of the Governing Council that they took when we reached agreement on how the political process would move forward, which is that Islam, the recognition of Islam, as the identity of the majority of Iraqis," said Dan Senor, the coalition spokesman in Baghdad. "But at the same time, ensuring there are protections for freedom of religious worship in this country for all Iraqis. The statements made by Ambassador Bremer yesterday are consistent with the agreement reached in the fall of last year."

For the past four decades, Iraqi women have had some of the most modern legal protections in the Muslim world, under a civil code that prohibits marriage below age 18, arbitrary divorce and male favoritism in child custody and property inheritance disputes.

Saddam Hussein's dictatorship did not touch those rights. But the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council has voted to wipe them out, ordering in late December that family laws shall be "canceled" and such issues placed under the jurisdiction of Islamic legal doctrine, called sharia.

This week outraged Iraqi women -- including judges and Cabinet ministers -- denounced the decision in street protests and at conferences, saying it would set back their legal status by centuries and could unleash clashes among various Islamic strains that have differing rules for marriage, divorce and other family issues.

"This will send us home and shut the door, just like what happened to women in Afghanistan," said Amira Hassan Abdullah, a Kurdish lawyer. Some Islamic laws, she noted, allow men to divorce their wives on the spot.

"The old law wasn't perfect, but this one would make Iraq a jungle," she said. "Iraqi women will accept it over their dead bodies."

The order, narrowly approved by the 25-member council in a closed-door session Dec. 29, was made while Abdul Aziz Hakim, a conservative Shiite Muslim who heads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was chairing the council under a rotating leadership system. The order is being opposed by several liberal members as well as by senior women in the Iraqi government.

By Michael Rothfeld
Staff Writer

As a 20-year-old photographer documenting the country's struggle over the Vietnam War, Ken Light snapped the picture of John Kerry at a peace rally in Mineola. It captured the future senator alone at a podium, squinting into the sun.

Light did not photograph Jane Fonda on that warm June Sunday in 1971. The actress, who is reviled by many Vietnam veterans for her vocal stance against the war, did not even attend.

But when opponents of the Democratic presidential hopeful began e-mailing Light's picture to one another four days ago, it depicted Fonda standing by Kerry's side. The photo had been doctored.

"I'm horrified," said Light, 52, who grew up in East Meadow and now heads the graduate photojournalism program at the University of California at Berkeley. "I think this kind of alteration is probably one of the scariest forms of trickery, particularly when it's done against a political candidate."

Dag Vega, a spokesman for Kerry's campaign, said, "The smear tactics have started already."

Kerry, who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War, spoke at the Register for Peace Rally on June 13, 1971, when thousands gathered for "the largest anti-war demonstration ever held on Long Island," according to a story in Newsday the next day. Light recalled Long Islanders of all ages sprawled across the State Supreme Court mall in Mineola, with American flags and peace symbols. Former members of Congress who attended included Bella Abzug, Allard Lowenstein and Lester Wolff. Folk singer Peter Yarrow entertained, and the rally ended with a burst of thunder and lightning.

Light, a student in Ohio at the time, took the picture of Kerry but never published it, and it sat in his files until two weeks ago when he shipped it to Corbis, his Seattle-based agent, which placed it in its online archives.

That is apparently where someone found it, and attempted to capitalize on the attention garnered by an authentic photo of Kerry and Fonda at a Vietnam-era rally -- seated some distance apart -- posted early this month on a Web site called www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnkerry.com. The Web site's creator, Ted Sampley, a Vietnam veteran from North Carolina, said he received the doctored photo by e-mail on Wednesday from a woman in Richmond, Va.

"Thought you might want to include this pic on your site," said the note from Loree Siemek, with an attachment called "HanoiJohn.jpg," a takeoff on "Hanoi Jane," the derisive nickname given to Fonda by her critics during the Vietnam era. It is made to look like a newspaper clipping, headlined "Fonda Speaks to Vietnam Veterans at Anti- War Rally," with an Associated Press photo credit. Sampley said he was immediately skeptical, and e-mailed it to some friends who concluded it was faked. He did not post it.

"I looked at it and it didn't feel right," Sampley said in an interview. "It just looked too good."

Siemek, 34, reached by phone, said she found the picture on a conservative Internet message board and had no idea it was phony.

"This thing has spiraled out of control," Siemek said. "If I had any thought that photo was not real, I would never have forwarded it to the veterans' group."

February 17, 2004
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Economic Report of the President, released last week, has drawn criticism on several fronts. Let me open a new one: the report's discussion of health care, which shows a remarkable indifference to the concerns of ordinary Americans — and suggests a major political opening for the Democrats.

According to a recent Gallup poll, 82 percent of Americans rank health care among their top issues. People are happy with the quality of health care, if they can afford it, but they're afraid that they might not be able to afford it. Unlike other wealthy countries, America doesn't have universal health insurance, and it's all too easy to fall through the cracks in our system. When I saw that the president's economic report devoted a whole chapter to health care, I assumed that it would make some attempt to address these public concerns.

Instead, the report pooh-poohs the problem. Although more than 40 million people lack health insurance, this doesn't matter too much because "the uninsured are a diverse and perpetually changing group." This is good news? At any given time about one in seven Americans is uninsured, which is bad enough. Because the uninsured are a "perpetually changing group," however, a much larger fraction of the population suffers periodic, terrifying spells of being uninsured, and an even larger fraction lives with the fear of losing insurance if anything goes wrong at work or at home.

The report also seems to have missed the point of health insurance. It argues that it would be a good thing if insurance companies had more information about the health prospects of clients so "policies could be tailored to different types and priced accordingly." So if insurance companies develop a new way to identify people who are likely to have kidney problems later in life, and use this information to deny such people policies that cover dialysis, that's a positive step?

Having brushed off the plight of those who, for economic or health reasons, cannot get insurance, the report turns to a criticism of health insurance in general, which it blames for excessive health care spending.

Is this really the crucial issue? It's true that the U.S. spends far more on health care than any other country, but this wouldn't be a bad thing if the spending got results. The real question is why, despite all that spending, many Americans aren't assured of the health care they need, and American life expectancy is near the bottom for advanced countries.

Where is the money going? A lot of it goes to overhead. A recent study found that private insurance companies spend 11.7 cents of every health care dollar on administrative costs, mainly advertising and underwriting, compared with 3.6 cents for Medicare and 1.3 cents for Canada's government-run system. Also, our system is very generous to drug companies and other medical suppliers, because — unlike other countries' systems — it doesn't bargain for lower prices.

The result is that American health care, which at its best is the best in the world, offers much of the population a worst-of-all-worlds combination of insecurity and high costs. And that combination is getting worse: insurance premiums are rising, and companies are becoming increasingly unwilling to offer insurance to their employees.

What would an answer to the growing health care crisis look like? It would surely involve extending coverage to those now uninsured. To keep costs down, it would crack down both on drug prices and on administrative costs. And it might well cut private insurance companies out of the loop for some, if not all, coverage.

But the administration can't offer such an answer, both because of its ideological blinders and because of its special interest ties. The Economic Report of the President has only negative things to say about efforts to hold down drug prices. It talks at length about insurance reform, but it mainly complains that we rely too much on insurance; it says nothing about either expanding coverage or reducing insurance-company overhead. Its main concrete policy suggestion is a plan for tax-deductible health savings accounts, which would be worth little or nothing to a vast majority of the uninsured.

I'll talk more about alternatives for health care in future columns. But for now, let's just note that this is an issue the public cares about — an issue the administration can't address, but a bold Democrat can.

"The first thing I would do is something I regret we haven't done in the last year or two -- is restore PAGE and discretionary caps, because unless you get a budget process system in place, which enables you to handle decision-making so that priorities can be constructed in the manner which will ultimately get you to where you want to go, I don't know how you do it."

We ought to be looking at getting as much as we can in the longer run in the way of expenditure restraint before we look at the issue of filling the gap on the tax side in order to get a viable fiscal policy."

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration quietly shelved a proposal to ban a gasoline additive that contaminates drinking water in many communities, helping an industry that has donated more than $1 million to Republicans.

The Environmental Protection Agency's decision had its origin in the early days of President Bush's tenure when his administration decided not to move ahead with a Clinton-era regulatory effort to ban the clean-air additive methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE.

The proposed regulation said the environmental harm of the additive leaching into ground water overshadowed its beneficial effects to the air.

The Bush administration decided to leave the issue to Congress, where it has been bogged down by a proposal to shield the industry from some lawsuits. That initiative is being led by the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas.

"The use of MTBE as an additive in gasoline presents an unreasonable risk to the environment," said a draft of the proposed regulation the EPA sent to the White House on the last full day of the Clinton administration in January 2001. The EPA document went on to say that "low levels of MTBE can render drinking water supplies unpotable due to its offensive taste and odor" and that the additive should be phased out over four years.

"Unlike other components of gasoline, MTBE dissolves and spreads readily in the ground water . . . resists biodegradation, and is more difficult and costly to remove."

People say MTBE-contaminated water tastes like turpentine.

In Santa Monica, Calif., the oil industry will pay hundreds of millions of dollars because the additive contaminated the city's water supply.

"We're the poster child for MTBE, and it could take decades to clean this up," said Joseph Lawrence, assistant city attorney.

In 2000, the MTBE industry's lobbying group told the Clinton administration that limiting MTBE's use by regulation "would inflict grave economic harm on member companies."

Three MTBE producers account for half of the additive's daily output.

The three contributed $338,000 to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Republican Party, and Republican congressional candidates in 1999 and 2000, twice what they gave Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Since then, the three producers have given just over $1 million to Republicans.

"OPEC's decision ... is one more reason on an already lengthy list of why U.S. consumers are likely to pay the highest gasoline prices on record this year," AAA spokesman Geoff Sundstrom said.

Gas prices "will certainly breach" the $2 mark on the back of OPEC's announcement, said Kevin Kerr, a senior trading director at KWEST Trading International. "At the same time, the economic recovery in the United States and other parts of the world ... and the draw on existing energy supplies could be disastrous."

Since the oil market didn't anticipate OPEC's dramatic moves, "the shockwave will be felt all the way to the pumps," Kerr said.

A survey of the five market analysts found all agree that retail gas prices will, at the very least, hit a new record this year.

Indeed, if crude inventories don't increase, and if OPEC votes to cut another 5 percent from its output, unleaded gas prices could reach the "upper limits of $2.75 to $3 this summer," said John Person, head financial analyst at Infinity Brokerage Services.....

......"Over and over again, OPEC raised crude oil prices ... saying the weaker dollar brings member nations lower revenues because oil is traded in dollars," Kerr said. "It isn't rocket science to figure out they will likely do this again with the dollar reaching new lows."

Fimat USA analyst John Kilduff sees a different driver. He said the dollar's decline coincides with a much bigger factor for oil prices: "The lowest U.S. crude-oil inventories in a generation."

Yet Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst at the Oil Price Information Service in Lakewood, N.J., believes the 2004 gasoline price rally won't be about crude, but about the level of gas supplies. "When traders fear a product may be 'short' as the season approaches, or when it actually is short or tight within [the] season, prices tend to migrate toward hyperbolic numbers.".....

......While Infinity's Person sees prices peaking at $3 in some metro areas in the worst of circumstances, OPIS' Kloza sees average prices rising above $2 but reaching the high-$2 range for only a brief period if at all. If any region sees prices near $3 a gallon, it would be already high-priced markets like California and Chicago and would occur only after a refinery outage or two, he said.

"The gasoline market will have an irregular heartbeat ... racing at times and resemble brachyadia at others," Kloza said. "The overall retail average for the year will be the highest ever," but there will a huge gap between the highest and lowest prices, which could still run as low as $1 a gallon in some states.

Fimat's Kilduff said it would be difficult for average prices to climb much higher than $2. "Some sort of government intervention would occur at levels around $2.25," he said, though he did accept the possibility of $3 gas in certain snag-prone areas, such as California.

Enercast's Ameko argued that federal and state politicians would likely intercede rather than sit idly by should prices skyrocket.

"Going into an election year, $3 retail prices would spell disaster," Ameko said. He doesn't expect demand to be strong enough to lift prices above $2.25, and suggested prices will average around $2.15.

The movement, known as offshore outsourcing, is growing, Mr. Mankiw acknowledged. But he said it was "just a new way of doing international trade" and "a good thing" that would make the American economy more efficient and would free American workers to eventually get better jobs.

History suggests that Mr. Mankiw may be right. The American economy has adapted to unsettling new waves of competition in the past.

Still, many industry executives, analysts and academics — not distraught American workers alone — say the nature of the economic challenge appears to be fundamentally different this time.

The differences, they say, include the kinds of jobs affected by outsourcing, the number of jobs potentially at risk and the politics of developing an effective policy response.

Globalization and technology are amplifying the impact of outsourcing. For decades, American foreign policy has been to urge developing nations and Communist countries to join the global economy in earnest. Now they have, and vast numbers of skilled workers have joined the world labor force, seemingly overnight. Countries like China, India and Russia educate large numbers of engineers. Add the low-cost, nearly instantaneous communication afforded by the Internet, and an Indian computer programmer making $20,000 a year or less can replace an American programmer making $80,000 a year or more.

"The structure of the world has changed," said Craig R. Barrett, chief executive of Intel, the Silicon Valley company that is the world's leading computer chip maker. "The U.S. no longer has a lock on high-tech, white-collar jobs."

"My own expectation is that the rate of productivity advance, which has been five percent plus over the recent past, is going to slow down significantly. And it's just a matter of arithmetic that if the overall demand continues roughly where it is -- the overall growth in demand essentially where it is, is that you will begin to create significant job growth.

"Is the administration's forecast (of 2.6 million jobs in 2004) feasible if productivity growth slows down to a more historic level? It's probably feasible. But we have not as yet seen any evidence that that is indeed the case. In other words, we're still seeing very little evidence of new job hiring ...

"No, I don't think it's fantasy-land. I think it's probably the most likely projection."

Rebels overpower security forces

Devastating attacks on police and army bases show insurgents can fight American-trained forces head on - and win

15 February 2004

In a shattering blow to the American occupation of Iraq, insurgents yesterday successfully stormed the Iraqi police headquarters in Fallujah, shooting their way in and killing at least 19 people. The guerrillas, armed with heavy machine-guns and rockets, also overpowered the local Iraqi army garrison.

US forces, unable to reach the scene in time, were powerless to intervene as their newly created Iraqi security forces were quickly overwhelmed. Some 75 prisoners managed to escape during the raid.

An Iraqi police officer told yesterday how the attackers moved from room to room inside the police headquarters, gunning down the helpless police officers where they stood, even killing the wounded. He said he only survived because he was able to kick away a grenade the insurgents threw at him.

Four of the attackers were killed in the gun battle. Iraqi police said they believed three of them were foreign militants, because they were carrying foreign passports, but that the fourth was carrying an Iraqi identity card from Baghdad - but it was impossible to confirm these claims.

The Iraqi army base attacked yesterday was the same one at which General Johan Abizaid, the most senior American general in Iraq, narrowly escaped with his life in a rocket-propelled grenade attack two days earlier. Yesterday's raid capped a terrible week for the occupation, in which at least 100 Iraqis died in two suicide bombings aimed at new police and army recruits.

It was a devastating display of power by the insurgents. They have moved beyond car bombings now. They are able to fight head on with American-trained Iraqi security forces and capture their own bases from them. These are the forces the Americans were planning to entrust with security when they hand over political control to an interim Iraqi government on 30 June. In fact, there were no American forces inside Fallujah when the attack happened yesterday because the US has been trying to pull its own troops out of harm's way, handing over day-to-day security to Iraqis.

On Friday, a retired officer with the Alabama Air National Guard told CNN that he witnessed Bush serving his weekend duty in 1972 -- an account that could be significant given the persistent Democratic questions.

Speaking Friday from Daytona Beach, Florida, John B. "Bill" Calhoun said he commanded Bush and that Bush attended four to six weekend drills at Dannelly Field in Montgomery. He said Bush was with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Alabama in 1972.

The drills consisted of eight-hour shifts Saturdays and Sundays, Calhoun said.

"We didn't have the planes that he could fly," Calhoun said. "But he studied his manuals, he read flying safety regulations, accident reports -- things pilots do quite often when they are not getting ready to fly or if they don't have other duties."

When Bush first arrived, he said he was living in Montgomery and working on the Senate campaign, Calhoun said.

Calhoun said he learned from another person that Bush was the son of George H.W. Bush, who at the time was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Calhoun said he asked the younger Bush if he planned to pursue a political career, and he said, "I don't know, probably."

The retired general said he is not surprised that more servicemen haven't come forward to talk about Bush's time at the base because they're a lot older and may have died, or retired and "gone on with their lives."

Calhoun said he does not have any photographs or documents to prove Bush showed up for duty, but his ex-wife, Patsy Burks, said she remembered Calhoun's account.

"Bill did come home [from the base] and told me that Bush was there," she said "I think what stuck in my head was that he was helping on the Senate campaign.

"What I do know about Bill is that whatever he says is the truth," she added. "This issue came up in the 2000 election. ... Bill did mention in 2000 that he contacted someone and said, 'If you need me to come forward, I will.' And they said, 'We're hoping that won't be necessary.'"

Questions about Bush's Guard service have intensified in recent weeks after Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe charged that Bush was absent without leave from his Guard service from May 1972 to May 1973, after he asked for the transfer.

Retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett told CNN that in 1997, he overheard Joe Allbaugh, Bush's chief of staff while Bush was Texas governor, tell the adjutant general of the Texas National Guard to gather Bush's files and "make sure there wasn't anything there that would embarrass the governor." About 10 days later, Burkett said, he saw many of Bush's files in a trash can. (Guardsman says he saw Bush's Guard records in trash)

Allbaugh reacted angrily to Burkett's charges, calling them "hogwash" and "absolute garbage." Allbaugh, who also served as the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he doesn't even know who the "goober" is, referring to Burkett.

Burkett's allegations were posted on Web sites just before the 2000 presidential election but were largely unreported by conventional media, according to USA Today.

But questions have lingered since that year's presidential campaign, after the Boston Globe uncovered a May 1973 evaluation by Bush's commander stating that the first lieutenant had not been seen during the previous year.

"It's good to see that after 10 years of stonewalling, George W. Bush is finally releasing his National Guard records," a campaign statement said. "Does this mean he's now ready to come clean with the American people and release the White House documents on pre-September 11th intelligence? Will he start telling the truth about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and the rush to war?"

Comedian's View of the U.S. Election Campaign

Feb 13, 8:48 am ET

WASHINGT0N (Reuters) - With the U.S. presidential election campaign under way, late night comedy television show hosts are taking a humorous look at the candidates.
Here are some lines broadcast on Thursday:

NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno":

"I was watching TV last night. I saw an interesting documentary on the Ninja, the Japanese soldier. According to legend the Ninjas were warriors who could make themselves invisible whenever there was a war. Kind of like Bush and the National Guard."

"The White House has now released military documents that they say prove George Bush met his requirements for the National Guard. Big deal, we've got documents that prove Al Gore won the election."

CBS' "The Late Show with David Letterman":

"There was an embarrassing moment in the White House earlier today. They were looking around while searching for George Bush's military records. They actually found some old Al Gore ballots."

"President Bush says that he can't find any of his National Guard records from the 70s. Oh sure, but he's got no problem finding photos of John Kerry with Jane Fonda from the 70s."

Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart":

"The White House released documents it claims validates the president's (National Guard) service ... When deciphered the documents showed that in a one-year period, 1972 and 1973, Bush received credit for nine days of active National Guard service. The traditional term of service then and now for the National Guard is one weekend a month and two full weeks a year, meaning that Bush's nine-day stint qualifies him only for the National Guard's National Guard. That's the National Guard's National Guard, an Army of None."

Mr. Bush's acceptance of special-interest money and his subsequent rewards to the industries doing the giving dwarf anything in Mr. Kerry's record. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, whose figures are cited in the Bush campaign video, Mr. Bush has raised more than four times as much from lobbyists during the 2004 race as Mr. Kerry has -- $960,000 for Mr. Bush to $235,000 for Mr. Kerry. During the 2000 contest, the Bush campaign assigned an industry code to givers so it would know precisely how much it was beholden and to whom. As electric utility lobbyist Thomas Kuhn explained in a 1999 letter to fundraisers, putting the code on the check "does ensure that our industry is credited, and that your progress is listed among the other business/industry sectors." Mr. Kuhn's progress may well have been noted; he met at least 14 times with Vice President Cheney's energy task force.

"Nominations and donations coincided"? You wonder what possessed the Bush people to bring that up. Of Mr. Bush's Pioneers -- those who raised at least $100,000 in the 2000 campaign -- 21 snagged ambassadorships, and these weren't hardship postings. Checks from "HMOs, telecoms, drug companies"? Mr. Bush has swamped Mr. Kerry in all three sectors during this campaign, raking in 10 times as much from donors connected to the pharmaceutical industry ($585,000 to $58,000) and telecommunications ($578,000 to $58,000). The liberal group Public Citizen counted 53 registered lobbyists among the current Pioneers and Rangers (the $200,000-and-up crowd.) Total amount bundled by lobbyists? At least $6.5 million this time around. Ka-ching. Ka-ching. Ka-ching.

And, since Mr. Bush brought it up, it's worth remembering that Mr. Kerry actually has some bona fides in the area of campaign finance ethics. He swore off checks from political action committees during his Senate races. He supported the McCain-Feingold legislation to end big soft-money checks to political parties -- which Mr. Bush's party did its best to kill and which the president only reluctantly signed. While the Bush administration fights to keep secret the activities of its energy task force, Mr. Kerry has promised to release the records of his meetings with lobbyists during his time in office.

" 'Get going' is the operative term. You've had a couple of weeks where the free media has not been what it should be.
There's a need for an antidote."

The New York Times, for example, has tracked down 16 retired personnel who served at the base in 1972 and none could recall seeing Bush.

Closer to home, Alabama papers have apparently done relatively little digging at and around Dannelly Air Base, a compound located next to Montgomery's airport and home to the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group, judging from the scant reports on their online archives.

The Birmingham News (Click for QuikCap) did find retired Lt. Col. Reese Bricken, former commander of the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron, who lives in Montgomery. "He never did come to my squad," Bricken said, referring to Bush, in an article published Thursday. "He was never at my unit." After reviewing documents provided by the paper, Bricken added, "He was looking for a place to hang his hat, but he never came by."

The paper also spoke to retired General William Turnipseed, who remains a well-known figure due to his role in the groundbreaking story on this subject by Walter Robinson in The Boston Globe in 2000. Turnipseed told the Birmingham News that he still doesn't remember Bush "showing up" and that former unit members who have contacted him couldn't remember Bush either.

Turnipseed said he remains a Bush supporter and complained, "I'm fed up. People want me to give them something to bash Bush."

The paper, however, did find one person who met Bush back then. Joe LeFevers, a member of the 187th in 1972, said he remembers seeing Bush in unit offices, and being told he was in Montogmery to work on an election campaign.

Local sentiment in conservative Alabama may be against much journalistic probing. A reader's comment in The Huntsville Times held that "George Bush was never AWOL" and simply missed one meeting and made it up. "He has done nothing wrong," the reader continued. "Stop your whining!"

Recalls Memphian Mintz, now 62: “I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with.” But, says Mintz, that “somebody” -- better known to the world now as the president of the United States -- never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a FedEx pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember.

“And I was looking for him,” repeated Mintz, who said that he assumed that Bush “changed his mind and went somewhere else” to do his substitute drill. It was not “somewhere else,” however, but the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly to which the young Texas flyer had requested transfer from his regular Texas unit – the reason being Bush’s wish to work in Alabama on the ultimately unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of family friend Winton "Red" Blount.

NEW YORK - (KRT) - George W. Bush left his Texas Air National Guard assignment and moved to Alabama in 1972 even though the Air Force denied his request for a transfer, according to his military records.

In fact, Bush did not even ask for an official transfer until nine days after he moved to Alabama in May 1972.

The Air Force quickly rejected Bush's request, saying the fighter pilot was "ineligible" to move to the Alabama unit Bush wanted - a squadron of postal handlers.

Nevertheless, Bush stayed in Alabama until his Texas commanders finally gave him written authorization five months later to train there.

The controversy over Bush's Vietnam War-era record - and Democratic charges that he was AWOL - has prodded records documenting his service into public scrutiny. While they suggest he complied with the requirements of the time, they also show long absences from duty and that he was suspended from flying.

As the questions about his service continued at the White House for a second day, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan denounced them as "gutter politics."

Bush went to Alabama to work on the Republican senate campaign of Winton (Red) Blount. Mary Marks Curtis of Montgomery, Ala., who worked with Bush and dated him at the time, said that after the election, "he left and came back to Montgomery in late November or early December. He told me that he was coming back to Montgomery because he had to fulfill his Guard duty."

A former senior Virginia Air National Guard commander, who served with George W. Bush in the Texas Air Guard, says Bush looked into volunteering for Vietnam combat service but was told he did not have the required flight experience.

William J. Campenni, a retired Air Guard colonel, also said absences such as Bush's from his unit were common in the Air Guard during the period of Bush's service and still are.

He and Bush were young lieutenants and pilots in the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron of the Texas Air Guard from 1970 to 1971, Campenni said, serving under the same flight and squadron commanders, both of whom are now dead.

Campenni, 63, lives in Herndon and has participated in Republican Party politics in Northern Virginia. He retired as an Air Force pilot in 1998, last flying with the 192nd Fighter Wing based at Richmond International Airport.

By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

February 13, 2004

WASHINGTON — In a blow to the Bush administration, the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that it planned to investigate whether White House officials exaggerated the Iraq threat or pressured analysts to tailor their assessments of Baghdad's weapons programs to bolster the case for war.

The move puts claims made by President Bush and other senior officials in his administration squarely in the sights of the committee's investigation, and could add to the White House's political troubles as it tries to keep questions about the war from becoming a drag on Bush's reelection campaign.

The White House and Republican leaders in Congress had sought for months to confine the inquiry to the performance of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, and to insulate the administration. But the Senate panel voted unanimously Thursday to expand the probe after some GOP members appeared ready to break from the Republican position.

The expansion was a victory for Democrats, who have argued for months that many of the claims made by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and others were not backed up by the intelligence.

"We will address the question of whether intelligence was exaggerated or misused by reviewing statements by senior policymakers to determine if those statements were substantiated by the intelligence," said Sen. John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee.

The change in scope was announced in a statement issued by Rockefeller and the chairman of the panel, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.). The statement outlined a new course for an investigation that is already several months along, and has involved interviews with dozens of U.S. intelligence officials and reviews of thousands of pages of classified documents.

New areas of inquiry will include "whether any influence was brought to bear on anyone to shape their analysis to support policy objectives," the statement said. Sources involved in the investigation said they had turned up no evidence so far that there was such pressure, or that analysts shaded their assessments to please the White House.

The committee said it would examine the role played by a controversial intelligence unit set up secretly at the Pentagon to search for ties between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The unit in the so-called Office of Special Plans has been accused of cherry-picking data to help bolster White House claims of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties that the CIA and other agencies viewed far more skeptically.

The committee also will focus new scrutiny on the intelligence community's use of information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group during Saddam Hussein's regime that lobbied for years for a U.S. effort to oust the Iraqi president, and whose leaders have ties to senior members of the Bush administration. Critics say the INC has served up a stream of Iraqi defectors with exaggerated or unfounded claims about Iraq's weapons programs and other activities.

But the most significant shift for the committee is its determination to now examine "whether public statements and reports and testimony regarding Iraq" by administration figures were "substantiated by intelligence information." The statement said the committee would examine public comments and claims made not only by the current administration but by officials in the Clinton administration.

A senior aide on the committee said the panel had yet to determine exactly how it would decide whether White House officials' claims were supported by the underlying intelligence. But he said it had already collected claims and statements dating to the early 1990s, and had assembled all of the relevant intelligence assessments and reports. "All that has to be done now is the comparison," he said.

The committee now plans to issue an initial report based on its review of the performance of the intelligence agencies in late March or early April, the aide said, and the new areas of investigation could be the subject of a subsequent report. No date has been set, but Democrats are likely to push to get the information released well before the November elections.

The expansion marks a surprising shift in direction for the committee. Roberts and other Republicans had resisted the idea of scrutinizing the administration's public statements or interactions with intelligence analysts on the grounds that it was inherently political and beyond the jurisdiction of a congressional intelligence panel. Recent developments put new pressure on Republicans to give ground to Democrats.

The possibility that a compromise might be reached surfaced Wednesday when Roberts and Rockefeller met in a closed-door session with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.) to discuss an expansion of the investigation. Hagel is said by several sources to be one of the Republicans who believed the expansion was necessary. A spokesman for Hagel declined to comment.

The former chief U.S. weapons hunter in Iraq, David Kay, said recently that he believed an examination of the administration's claims should accompany the review of the intelligence. After he resigned last month, Kay said that the prewar intelligence on Iraq was wrong and that he does not believe there were any banned weapons in Baghdad when the United States invaded last year.

Last week, CIA Director George J. Tenet gave a speech defending his agency, acknowledging problems with its prewar estimates but stressing that it never portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States. That remark seemed to undercut one of the administration's principal cases for launching the war over objections from France, Germany and other longtime allies.

White House officials have recently said they never used the word "imminent" to describe the threat, but a review of their statements shows they repeatedly portrayed the danger as urgent. Bush described Hussein's regime as a "grave and growing" danger and warned that the United States could not wait for definitive proof that Hussein had weapons stockpiles.

"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002. Since Hussein was ousted, some in the administration have retreated from insisting that weapons would be found.

By PAUL KRUGMAN

To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures.

By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River.

It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential.

The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office.

Operation Flight Suit was only slightly more over the top than other Bush photo-ops, like the carefully staged picture that placed Mr. Bush's head in line with the stone faces on Mount Rushmore. The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive discussion of his policies.

In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history — the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq — and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September.

But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets — or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence — their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image.

There is, as far as I can tell, no positive evidence that Mr. Bush is a man of exceptional uprightness. When has he even accepted responsibility for something that went wrong? On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that he is willing to cut corners when it's to his personal advantage. His business career was full of questionable deals, and whatever the full truth about his National Guard service, it was certainly not glorious.

Old history, you may say, and irrelevant to the present. And perhaps that would be true if Mr. Bush was prepared to come clean about his past. Instead, he remains evasive. On "Meet the Press" he promised to release all his records — and promptly broke that promise.

I don't know what he's hiding. But I do think he has forfeited any right to cite his character to turn away charges that his administration is lying about its policies. And that is the point: Mr. Bush may not be a particularly bad man, but he isn't the paragon his handlers portray.

Some of his critics hope that the AWOL issue will demolish the Bush myth, all at once. They're probably too optimistic — if it were that easy, the tale of Harken Energy would have already done the trick. The sad truth is that people who have been taken in by a cult of personality — a group that in this case includes a good fraction of the American people, and a considerably higher fraction of the punditocracy — are very reluctant to give up their illusions. If nothing else, that would mean admitting that they had been played for fools.

Still, we may be on our way to an election in which Mr. Bush is judged on his record, not his legend. And that, of course, is what the White House fears.

The investigation has already spread through much of the White House. Among those who have been interviewed by the F.B.I. are Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, and powerful behind-the-scenes figures like I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff. Those who have trooped in to answer questions from the grand jury include Scott McClellan, Mr. Bush's press secretary; Claire Buchan, a deputy press secretary; Mary Matalin, a former top adviser to Mr. Cheney; and Adam Levine, a former White House communications aide.

GOV. BUSH: Well -- I don't think so. I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war; that's what it's meant to do. And when it gets overextended, morale drops.

And I'm not -- I strongly believe we need to have a military presence in the Korea peninsula, not only to keep the peace on the peninsula, but to keep regional stability. And I strongly believe we need to keep a presence in NATO. But I'm going to be judicious as to how to use the military. It needs to be in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious.

Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?

President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al-Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.

12:37 PM PST, February 12, 2004

A United Nations representative, trying to determine a stable transition of power in Iraq, strongly backed an influential Shiite cleric's view today to choose a new government through national elections.

Lakdar Brahimi, the U.N. adviser, was unable to say whether the elections could be held by June 30. On that date, the U.S. hopes that transitional leaders can be chosen through a caucus system until a national vote can be held in early 2005.

The leading cleric of Iraq's Shiite majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has called for swift, direct elections rather than the U.S.-backed plan for a caucus system. His demand, which drew tens of thousands of supporters to a rally last month, forced the Bush administration to ask for U.N. intervention. But he has called off further protests until the U.N. completes its work.

"Al-Sistani is still insisting on the elections," Brahimi told reporters after the meeting in Sistani's home in Najaf. "We are with him 100% because elections is the best way to establish a state that serves the interests of its people."

Shiites, who were suppressed under ousted President Saddam Hussein, account for roughly 60% of Iraq's 25 million population. They seek a stronger role in the new government.

Brahimi, 70, whose four decades of peacemaking in hot spots from Lebanon to Afghanistan have made him a revered U.N. figure, is expected to hold talks with Iraqis and the Coalition Provisional Authority in order to broker deals over the next week.

The U.N. has conducted scores of similar preelection assessments worldwide, but the Iraq mission is unique because of its sense of urgency and the worldwide scrutiny surrounding it.

One key objective is to determine whether it would be possible to hold elections by May to meet a June 30 deadline to transfer authority from the U.S. to a new transitional assembly. Many experts doubt that legitimate elections could take place by then, given Iraq's lack of voter rolls and security.

As a result, there's a growing consensus that the U.N. team will be asked to broker a political compromise between the United States, with its caucus plan, and many Shiites, who would presumably prevail in direct elections.

E&P read 27 columns by conservatives who mentioned Bush during the past 13 days. Nine of the columns had at least some questions about the president and his policies.

For instance, George Will of the Washington Post Writers Group wrote that Bush's "accumulating errors are undermining the premise of his reelection campaign, which is: Wartime demands hard choices and sacrifices, and a president who is steady, measured, and believable. ... Once begun, leakage of public confidence is difficult to stanch."

Another conservative WPWG columnist, Charles Krauthammer, said voters may choose John Kerry over Bush because of the Democrat's stronger military experience. "Sept. 11 reminded us that the '90s were an anomaly," Krauthammer wrote. "And upon returning to a world of mortal conflict with people who really want you destroyed, you instinctively want someone not new to the idea of war."

Robert Novak of the Chicago Sun-Times and Creators Syndicate added: "Most worrisome to Republicans is Kerry's war-hero image while, in the words of one prominent Bush supporter, 'our guy was drinking beer in Alabama.'"

Wall Street Journal contributing columnist Peggy Noonan wrote of Bush's "Meet the Press" appearance: "The president seemed tired, unsure, and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive... . He did not seem prepared."

Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle and Creators wrote that the Bush administration's "first-term spending spree isn't sitting well with those who have to bankroll it. ... Simply put, Bush broke the covenant Republican officeholders are supposed to share with voters: that they'll be tight with other people's money."

William Murchison of Creators asked: "Why no Bush vetoes of inappropriate appropriations?"

Pat Buchanan of Creators wrote that the Bush administration "invaded an oil-rich country on what the world believes were false pretenses and forged evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."

Another Creators columnist, Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly, was quoted by Reuters as saying he's "much more skeptical about the Bush administration now" since weapons inspector David Kay expressed doubt about Iraq having WMDs.

WASHINGTON ? The White House last night released a document showing that President Bush appeared at a military base in Alabama during the last year of his National Guard service, but aides backed away yesterday from his weekend pledge to release all his military records.
Bush's staff released a copy of a dental evaluation Bush had in the National Guard in Alabama in 1973 to rebut suggestions by Democrats who have questioned whether he ever showed up for duty there.

Bush enlisted in the Guard in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, and became a first lieutenant and an F-102 fighter pilot before leaving in 1973 to attend Harvard Business School.

Throughout his political career, opponents have focused on May 1972 to May 1973, during which it has been unclear how he fulfilled his military service. Bush has said that he performed temporary duty in Montgomery, Ala., while he was working on a U.S. Senate campaign, but there has been no definitive proof he did so. In addition, his records for that period indicate that he no longer took military physicals and was suspended from flying.

The dental examination was performed on Jan. 6, 1973, at Dannelly Air National Guard Base, which is south of Montgomery. According to the White House, the dental exam shows Bush did report for duty in Alabama. The exam, however, was done after November 1972, when earlier reports have said Bush returned to Texas.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration would not necessarily make public additional records of Bush's tenure in the National Guard unless the president's aides determine that they are "relevant to this issue."

Specifically, McClellan refused to commit to releasing medical or disciplinary records that become available to the White House. Bush's aides had released payroll records and other documents on Tuesday that they thought would douse the controversy, but instead they inflamed it by raising new questions both about Bush's service records and the White House's current claims.

"I think what you are seeing is gutter politics," he said. "The American people deserve better. There are some who are not interested in their facts. They are simply trolling for trash."

Administration officials confirmed yesterday that the Defense Department is pulling together all of Bush's payroll, personnel and medical records from the National Guard to centralize his file.

But White House communications director Dan Bartlett was emphatic that the administration had no immediate plans to open Bush's entire file, which would include his guard medical records.

"These are attempts to troll for personal records for partisan advantage. We're not going to play," Bartlett said. "The goal post is being moved."

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, acknowledged that his staff had begun to dig deeper into the life and career of Kerry, but said he had not heard anything about an alleged infidelity. "What we're finding, I don't know," he said. "This is the first we are looking into him this way."

"I would like to meet President Bush and tell him 'you claimed that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, and this is the evidence you occupied this country for this reason. So, what's your evidence now? Did you find the weapons of mass destruction?' No, it's occupation, colonialism." -- Turki al-Jaburi

"You know, all these matters have been exaggerated.

"After the Gulf War, they disconnected the whole program. They changed the program to pesticides and herbicides and other products. As I know, they destroyed all the weapons they had.'"

"Because most of the people working on the destruction of these weapons are my friends, my colleagues and we discuss about it. I was working in the research center. This is the most important center in the whole office, and we know what's going on outside."

"If they wanted to do it, they could, because the most important [element] is the people who are working in this field, and it needs very simple tools. No need for complicated instruments or anything. But, as I know, there was not any idea to re-start the program again."¹

....Agricultural tariffs today are four to eight times as high as tariffs on industrial goods. For certain products, agricultural tariffs are shockingly high: Japan's tariff on rice has been as high as 1,364 percent and the European Union's tariff on sugar beets as high as 540 percent; US tobacco tariffs have reached 350 percent.

Developed countries also heavily subsidize their farmers: The US slips them about $30 billion annually and the EU pays out some $45 billion. In the US, more than one-quarter of farm income can come from subsidies and higher prices due to trade barriers, in the EU more than one-third of income results from subsidies and trade barriers, and in Japan an impressive 60 percent of income results from these distortions.

Faced with these high tariffs and enormous subsidies, many developing countries question the American belief in free trade and free markets. The current trade round stalled at Cancún because developed countries failed to make far-reaching proposals to open their agricultural markets.

But the US often overlooks the fact that addressing the demands of developing countries is in America's best interests: Its own agricultural trade barriers damage its own economy, as well as that of developing countries. High US tariffs drain the wallets of American consumers, raising prices not only at the grocery store, but also at the mall. Keeping out low-priced cotton imports hurts the hard-pressed American textile industry, and US sugar tariffs hurt domestic producers of soft drinks and processed foods.

The billions spent on agricultural subsidies could be used to strengthen social security, fund Iraqi reconstruction, or reduce taxes for the average American. It would be nice to think that all this money is helping small family farms in the heartland. But in reality, more than 15 Fortune 500 companies receive subsidies and at least 100 large US farms receive more than $2 million in subsidies each.

While US barriers raise domestic prices, US subsidies artificially lower prices in the world's markets. Without these subsidies, the world price for many agricultural products would be significantly higher, and the small family farmers in Africa would earn substantially more for their labors.

How can the US free its economy of these damaging barriers and subsidies? While bilateral or regional trade agreements are easier to negotiate, agricultural subsidies - the core problem - cannot be addressed in bilateral agreements. The new US-Australia free-trade agreement, which excludes sugar and other key agricultural products, is only the latest example. Developed countries must reduce subsidies together: If the US agreed to eliminate subsidies in a bilateral agreement, Europe would flood US markets with subsidized products. To take the free-market plunge, everyone must jump in at the same time....

WASHINGTON - The ongoing war in Iraq cost about $4 billion in September, spiked to $7 billion in October and hit just under $3 billion in November, the Pentagon said Wednesday in its latest report on how much the military operation costs.

That amounted to roughly $14 billion spent on U.S. military operations in Iraq over the three-month period late last year, the latest figures available, said Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon's chief financial official.

He said analysts were trying to determine why the costs spiked in October.

Officials previously had said the occupation of Iraq is costing $1 billion a week.

Zakheim also sought to allay concerns, expressed by top military chiefs to a congressional committee Tuesday, that the Pentagon would run out of money to finance the efforts.

The Iraq war and occupation, along with the ongoing operations in Afghanistan, are being paid for through supplemental spending bills that are approved by Congress outside of the regular budget process.

Already, Congress has approved $166 billion for those operations. The Pentagon has said it does not expect the Bush administration to seek another spending bill until January 2005, but the chiefs of the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps suggested Tuesday that money will run out by the end of September.

Zakheim said Wednesday that the military can fill the gap by borrowing money from other operations and maintenance accounts. This causes some repairs and maintenance work to be delayed, but Zakheim said this would not lead to permanent problems if a supplemental spending bill were approved by the following spring.

Why wait? Zakheim said the Pentagon wanted to see how events in Iraq unfold this year before deciding how much money it will need.

He denied the suggestion that the Bush administration was waiting until after the November elections to prevent the cost from becoming a political issue.

The infected chickens were found on a farm in Sussex County that supplies birds to a large commercial processor. It is located about five miles from the Kent County farm where the virus was first detected late last week.

State Department of Agriculture officials said the outbreaks did not appear to be linked, but both farms and about 75 others around them will be quarantined and tested for up to a month. Farms with high rates of poultry mortality on the three-state Delmarva peninsula will also face increased testing, agricultural officials said.

Eleven countries, mostly in Asia, have banned imports of Delaware or U.S. poultry products as a precaution. Delmarva accounts for about 6 percent of American poultry exports.

Officials said they believe they can contain the avian flu to the two counties where the virus was found through quarantines, testing and disinfecting of trucks and equipment.

But anxiety is still reigning among farmers who do not know when they will be able to send their birds for processing.

"The dinner table conversation for a farmer tonight is about fear of losing his living," said Michael T. Scuse, Delaware's agriculture secretary. "We have people who have everything they own at stake. We can't emphasize enough how serious this is. This is very, very serious. We have a multibillion-dollar industry at stake."

Sussex is the largest broiler-producing county in the nation.

Both outbreaks involve a strain of the virus that is not considered a threat to humans who live nearby or purchase meat in grocery stores.

But extensive precautions are being taken across Delaware. Some 73,800 birds were destroyed yesterday, and meetings of farmers, sales and auctions of farm equipment, and sales of live poultry were ordered stopped.

Officials advised farmers to close off their farms to outsiders to prevent further spread of the avian flu, which is most often transmitted from bird to bird through mud and manure, and which can be tracked on shoes or vehicles. Birds also can transmit the virus to other birds through the air.

Quick action in this case can prevent the flu from mutating from what is thought to be a relatively mild strain into a more dangerous form that could seriously sicken birds or humans, health officials said.

The United States has had many avian flu outbreaks over the past several years, but none has ever killed a human, unlike the strain in Asia that has recently caused illness and death among people there.

Still, the local farmers are feeling the pressure.

William Messick, 69, whose 180-acre Kent County farm is in sight of the first case of avian flu, was among those whose birds have been tested and found to be clean. He has about 100,000 chickens that were supposed to be sent out for slaughter at Allen Family Foods Inc. last night and this morning, but that has been delayed until Friday. He hasn't left his farm since he got the news Saturday, not wanting to risk his livelihood.

"As Washington continues to celebrate the capture of Saddam Hussein, FRONTLINE takes viewers on a journey across Iraq to reveal just what it will take to stabilize the volatile nation and accelerate the transfer of power to the Iraqi people. In "Beyond Baghdad," FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith travels the length and breadth of Iraq for five weeks, interviewing everyone from tribal sheiks and ayatollahs to politicians and U.S. military commanders. Smith's reporting reveals a seriously fractured Iraq, where modest successes in nation-building have been offset by widespread inter-ethnic and sectarian rivalry, frustration, and violence."

Military officials say Mohammed Kadir Hussen's odyssey from his hometown, Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the battlegrounds of Iraq -- a journey outlined in a diary seized when he was arrested, a document now known as "the Book" -- provides a glimpse into what remains one of the murkiest aspects of the Iraq insurgency: the role of foreign jihadists, or so-called holy warriors of Islam.

" 'The Book' talked about the jihad: how the jihad was going to happen whether Saddam Hussein survived the war or not," said Col. David A. Teeples, commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which occupies a great swath of western Iraq and seized the young Saudi and his unusual travelogue. "People were coming from all over to fight and kill Westerners."

So many foreign fighters are said to have congregated in Qusaybah, a longtime smuggling hub, that the military nicknamed it "the jihad Super Bowl," Teeples said.

The Army says the primary threat in Iraq remains loyalists of the former regime. The foreign contingent may represent no more than 5 percent to 10 percent of the overall insurgent force of up to 5,000 people, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Baghdad.

But commanders also say the foreign fighters' impact has been significant and has probably yielded the bulk of what has become perhaps the insurgents' most potent weapon -- suicide bombers. However, the Army adds that no successful suicide bomber has yet to be positively identified.

Although Saddam's alleged relationship with al-Qaida was one of the justifications for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, no definitive operational link has yet been demonstrated between the Islamic militants and Saddam's decidedly secular government.

But with borders porous in the wake of the invasion, highly motivated jihadists - eager to confront Americans on Arab soil - have infiltrated the country, U.S. commanders concede. These shadowy forces have largely remained under the radar screen as the Army concentrates on cells of Saddam loyalists, commanders say.

"Perhaps with all the focus on former regime elements, some kind of screen is now down, and those terrorists who want to fight Americans are coming in," said Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine of the 82nd Airborne Division, which patrols the Fallujah zone, a hotbed of the insurgency.

There is no way to measure the influx of foreign combatants. They continue to arrive despite operations breaking down what Army officers call "rat lines" of support for jihadists arriving via Syria in the west and Iran in the east. In the last two weeks, the Army says, an Iranian and an Afghan were arrested in Baghdad while trying to put a roadside bomb in place, and a Jordanian with a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher was taken into custody. Several Egyptians and a suspected Yemeni extremist were picked up in Fallujah.

Last month, President Bush himself announced the capture of Hassan Ghul, who U.S. officials say may be the first confirmed al-Qaida operative arrested in Iraq. Ghul was allegedly a courier for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the reputed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks - and, like Ghul, a Pakistani.

U.S. commanders say it is extremely difficult to determine if the detained foreign fighters are linked to al-Qaida or other terror organizations, such as Ansar al Islam, a Kurdish extremist group suspected of having connections to the twin suicide attacks last week at Kurdish political party headquarters in northern Iraq that killed more than 100 people. Some of those captured boast of international terror affiliations; others deny such ties. Proving or disproving it can be almost impossible.

"No one is walking around with an al-Qaida identity card, as far as I know," said Col. Joe Anderson, who oversaw the occupation of the northern city of Mosul and surrounding areas with the 101st Airborne Division, which is returning home after almost a year in Iraq.

Many fighters captured or killed carry no identification whatsoever, so their origins remain murky. In such cases, officials rely on clues such as foreign currency found in their possession or, in the case of prisoners, their accents. Foreign fighters, frequently embracing martyrdom, are also more likely to fight to the death than other insurgents, commanders say.

Many of the foreign jihadists appear to be disaffected young men harboring an abiding hatred of the West, but having little or no previous experience in training camps or the battlefield -- a common profile among Saudis and others who have gravitated to holy war venues such as Afghanistan and Chechnya. This seems to have been the case with Mohammed Kadir Hussen.

"He was a poor Saudi guy without a lot of prospects," said a U.S. military intelligence official familiar with Hussen's travelogue. "He started out wanting to help other Muslims, and it evolved into this jihad."

Army officials agreed to talk in general terms about the young Saudi's life and diary but declined to provide a copy. The document has been translated into English and distributed among intelligence agencies.

U.S. authorities say they have traced efficient networks bringing in foreign jihadists. Middlemen known as "facilitators," mostly Iraqis, help guide the young fighters and direct them to safe houses where they can stay, arrange for basic training and acquire arms. Eventually they are deployed against U.S. forces.

The Army recently detained one such alleged facilitator, Madi Thiab Ruhaybi, an Iraqi man in his 50s known as Abu Mohammed who was captured near the bustling Trebil crossing point on the Iraq-Jordan border.

"Abu Mohammed was kind of a runner, a go-to guy, a guy who gets things done," the military intelligence official said. "He would go to the border and pick someone up, move money from here to there, get weapons - he would make all that happen. He was a mid- to lower-level guy, certainly not a decision-maker.

"If you're the boss, you need someone like Abu Mohammed to go out and do the dirty work. He knows where to go to get weapons. If you need coordination with your buddy in Syria to get foreign fighters in, he's the guy who goes out and makes the connection."

He is the kind of intermediary with whom Hussen probably hooked up when he arrived in Iraq. The fervent Saudi, in his 20s, is believed to have crossed the border in April or May, after Saddam's fall. He arrived first at this border outpost, at the time virtually wide open, officials said, and probably made contact with pro-Saddam hard-liners aiding foreign volunteers.

A marriage of convenience between former regime allies and foreign jihadists has marked the insurgency, U.S. officials say.

"The jihad people who came in had their own agenda. They were not connected to former regime loyalists, but to Islamic extremists," Teeples said. "But as this thing evolved, it became obvious that the best network for anyone coming from outside to fight would be to contact former regime loyalists. Those were the people who knew who to call, where to find safe houses, where to get their hands on money, weapons, transportation. They had intelligence on where the coalition troops were moving convoys, where troops were stationed, where mortars could be set up."

NO TEN TONIGHT

"I thought Bush was the right choice four years ago, but I've gotten to loathe the guy. I really don't like his stand on the Middle East and especially going to war with Iraq. Kerry looks like the guy to beat him." -- Janet Sproul

"Its not so much anti-Americanism I sense here as it is Bush being an alienating factor (in foreign attitudes)." -- Bailey Kasten

"There are a lot of angry people here tonight. It's the same everywhere. We haven't had such a surge in interest in the organization's 40-year history." -- Rachelle Valladeres, international chairwoman of the Democratic Party Abroad

"If Bush gets re-elected, I fear he will have so changed the basic social structures of America there won't be any way back (for such things as social security). Dean is very supportive of rescinding Bush's tax cuts and he seems to have energized the campaign." -- David Merrill

White House contends that the records show the president was paid for service dates during a period under scrutiny.
From Associated Press

11:22 AM PST, February 10, 2004

WASHINGTON -- The White House, facing election-year questions about President Bush's military service, released pay records and other information today that it said supports Bush's assertion that he fulfilled his duty as a member of the Air National Guard during the Vietnam war.

The material included annual retirement point summaries and pay records that the White House said show that Bush served.

"When you serve, you are paid for that service. These documents outline the days on which he was paid. That means he served. And these documents also show he met his requirements," press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters. "And it's just really a shame that people are continuing to bring this up."

"These documents clearly show that the president fulfilled his duties," McClellan said.

The documents indicate Bush received pay for six days of duty between May and December of 1972 when he was supposed to be on temporary duty in Alabama. There is a five-month stretch in 1972 when he was not paid for service. The records do not indicate what duty Bush performed or where he was.

The White House also has not been able to produce fellow guardsmen who could testify that Bush attended guard meetings and drills. "Obviously we would have made people available" if they had been found, McClellan said.

Sen. John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, is regularly accompanied by a "band of brothers" of military veterans who served with him in Vietnam.

Kerry said today he has said all he is going to say about Bush's record.

"I just don't have any comment on it," Kerry told reporters between campaign stops in Tennessee and Virginia. "It's not an issue that I chose to create. It's not my record that's at issue and I don't have any questions about it."

WASHINGTON — The manager of President Bush's reelection campaign said Monday that in an expected matchup with John F. Kerry, the Republican team would focus much of its criticism on the votes the Massachusetts senator cast to cut defense and intelligence spending and to oppose 1991's Persian Gulf War.

The comments by Ken Mehlman, posted on the Bush campaign's website, signaled that the president and his aides hoped to undercut Kerry's credentials on national security issues.

While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Kerry frequently has cited his Vietnam War record and belittled Bush's use of military themes and imagery. If Republicans want to talk about national security, Kerry tells crowds, he has a ready reply: "Bring it on!"

It appears that the Republicans will do just that — albeit carefully.

"We honor Sen. Kerry's patriotic service during the Vietnam War," Mehlman said in an "online chat" with Bush supporters. "Yet we question the judgments of his votes to consistently cut defense and intelligence funding, his vote against the first Gulf War, and his recently stated belief that the war on terror is primarily about law enforcement and intelligence."

David Wade, a Kerry spokesman, responded: "The GOP is resorting to their usual politics of attack and distortion. It's smart strategy. Otherwise they'd have to do something really desperate, and talk about their record."

But Bush advisors say that it is Kerry, by virtue of his thousands of votes during his 19-year career in the Senate, who has a vulnerable record. They plan to depict him as a "typical" Massachusetts liberal who is soft on defense and who has been tied to special interests.

"John Kerry is who he is, and he won't be able to run from that," said one Bush campaign advisor.

Mehlman also warned Kerry and other Democrats to steer clear of the questions some have raised about Bush's tenure in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. Bush flew a fighter jet when he was in the Guard from 1968 to 1973, but his units were not called into combat.

A car bomb exploded outside a police station in this town south of Baghdad today, killing at least 50 people and wounding about 100, a hospital official said.

Earlier the head of the Iraqi police force, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, put the death toll at 35, with up to 45 people wounded.

General Ibrahim and another officer confirmed that the blast was the work of a suicide bomber, but they were not sure how many people were in the car.

The deadly incident was seen as the latest in a string of attacks by insurgents against Iraqis considered collaborators with occupying coalition forces.

The dead and wounded apparently were civilians who were standing waiting to apply for police jobs, officials said. No policemen were killed, a local officer said, but nine policemen were believed to have been wounded.

Huge, angry crowds gathered outside the site of the blast and tried to loot the station. They were dispersed by gunfire, throwing stones at a police truck, shattering a window.

February 10, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Last Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics delivered yet another disappointing employment report.

Since there's a lot of confusion on this subject, let's talk about the numbers. The bureau actually produces two estimates of employment, one based on a survey that asks each employer in a random sample how many workers are on its payroll, the other on a survey that asks each household in a random sample how many of its members are employed. Most experts regard the employer survey as more reliable; even in the midst of the recovery, that survey has contained nothing but bad news. The household numbers look better, but not particularly good.

For technical reasons involving seasonal adjustment, many economists expected the January report to show a one-time bounce in both measures. Yet employment as measured by the payroll survey rose by only 112,000 — well short of the increase needed just to keep up with a growing population. If employment were rising as rapidly as it did when the economy was emerging from the 1990-1991 recession, we'd be seeing monthly numbers more like 275,000.

Taking a longer view, the payroll numbers tell a dismal story. Since the recovery officially began in November 2001, employment has actually fallen by half a percent, while the working-age population has increased about 2.4 percent. By this measure, jobs are becoming ever scarcer.

The household survey, on which the official unemployment rate is based, tells a less dismal but far from happy story. (Why the discrepancy? We don't know.) The number of people who say they have jobs has risen since the recovery began — but has still lagged behind population growth.

The only seemingly favorable statistic is the unemployment rate, which has recently fallen to 5.6 percent, the same as in November 2001. But how is that possible, when employment has grown more slowly than the population, or even declined? The answer is that people aren't counted as unemployed unless they're looking for work, and a growing fraction of the population isn't even looking. It's hard to see how this is good news.

Other indicators continue to suggest a grim job picture. In the last three months, more than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks. That's the worst number since 1983, and a sign that jobs remain very hard to find — which is what anyone who has lost a job will tell you.

One last statistic — not about jobs, but about wages. Since the last quarter of 2001, real G.D.P. has risen 7.2 percent. But wage and salary income, after adjusting for inflation, is up only 0.6 percent. This matches what the employer survey is telling us: America's workers have seen very little benefit from this recovery.

In the light of these dreary statistics, President Bush's recent cheerfulness seems almost surreal. On Friday, he said that he was "pleased, obviously, with the new job growth." When Tim Russert asked in the "Meet the Press" interview what happened to all the jobs that Mr. Bush promised his tax cuts would create, he replied: "It's happening. And there is good momentum when it comes to the creation of new jobs."

We expect politicians to place a positive spin on economic news, but to insist that things are going great when many people have personal experience to the contrary seems foolish. Mr. Bush's father lost the 1992 election in large part because he was perceived as being out of touch with the difficulties faced by ordinary Americans. Why is Mr. Bush — whose poll numbers are a bit worse than his father's were at this point in 1992 — running the risk of repeating his experience?

The answer, I think, is that the younger Mr. Bush has no choice. He has literally gone for broke, with repeated tax cuts that have fed a $500 billion deficit. To justify policies that more and more people call irresponsible, he must claim that wonderful things are happening as a result.

For a while, that famous 8 percent growth rate seemed to be just what he needed. But in the fourth quarter, growth dropped to 4 percent. And as we've seen, the jobs still aren't there.

So Mr. Bush must put on a brave face. He and his officials must talk up weak economic statistics as if they represented stunning success, and predict marvelous things any day now. After all, they have to keep this up for only nine more months.

President Bush's press secretary and a former White House press aide testified on Friday to a federal grand jury investigating who improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer, the press secretary and a lawyer for the aide said on Monday.

The appearances of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, and the press aide, Adam Levine, reflected what lawyers in the case said was the quickening pace of a criminal inquiry in which a special prosecutor is examining conversations between journalists and the White House.

When he was asked by reporters on Monday whether he had been questioned in the case, Mr. McClellan said he had been filmed by news organizations as he emerged from the federal courthouse. "I think that confirms it for you," he said.

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN!

Doubts, dissent stripped from public version of Iraq assessment

WASHINGTON - The public version of the U.S. intelligence community's key prewar assessment of Iraq's illicit arms programs was stripped of dissenting opinions, warnings of insufficient information and doubts about deposed dictator Saddam Hussein's intentions, a review of the document and its once-classified version shows.

As a result, the public was given a far more definitive assessment of Iraq's plans and capabilities than President Bush and other U.S. decision-makers received from their intelligence agencies.

The stark differences between the public version and the then top-secret version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate raise new questions about the accuracy of the public case made for a war that's claimed the lives of more than 500 U.S. service members and thousands of Iraqis.

The two documents are replete with differences. For example, the public version declared that "most analysts assess Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program" and says "if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade."

But it fails to mention the dissenting view offered in the top-secret version by the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, known as the INR.

That view said, in part, "The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq may be doing so, but INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment."

The alternative view further said "INR is unwilling to ... project a timeline for the completion of activities it does not now see happening."

Opportunity hit the headlines last week when it sent home pictures of smooth, round rocks on the surface of Meridiani Planum, the flat plain where it landed. Some scientists think the rocks may have been eroded by water, just like river pebbles.

But others say they could have been created when molten rock was hurled into the air by a volcanic eruption. This could have frozen as round droplets in the thin Martian atmosphere before falling to the ground. Such processes are well known on Earth.

The rocks could also be droplets of glass similarly formed during meteorite impacts, says Peter Schultz, a geologist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island1. "It's too early to conclude that Meridiani held water," says Schultz's colleague John Mustard.

By Warren Vieth and Edwin Chen
Times Staff Writers

2:09 PM PST, February 9, 2004

WASHINGTON — The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said today.

The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the U.S. economy.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."

The report, which predicts that the nation will reverse a three-year employment slide by creating 2.6 million jobs in 2004, is part of a weeklong effort by the administration to highlight signs that the recovery is picking up speed. Bush's economic stewardship has become a central issue in the presidential campaign, and the White House is eager to demonstrate that his policies are producing positive results.

In his message to Congress, Bush said the economy "was strong and getting stronger," thanks in part to the administration's tax cuts and other economic policies. He said the nation had survived a stock market meltdown, terrorist attacks, corporate scandals and a global economic slump, and was finally beginning to enjoy "a mounting prosperity that will reach every corner of America."

The president repeated that message during a "conversation" on the economy with workers at SRC Automotive in Springfield, Mo., an employee-owned firm that rebuilds car engines. In one of his most fervent appeals yet to make his tax cuts permanent, he said congressional opponents are seeking to impose a broad new tax hike. "Make no mistake about it," he said.

The president's 411-page report contains a detailed diagnosis of the forces contributing to the economic slowdown that began about the time Bush occupied the White House, and a wide-ranging defense of the policies he has pursued to combat it.

It asserts that the last recession actually began in late 2000, before Bush took office, instead of in March, 2001, as certified by the official recession dating panel of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Much of the report repeats the administration's previous economic prescriptions. The Bush tax cuts must be made permanent, it says, to have their full beneficial effect on the economy. Social Security must be restructured to let workers put part of their retirement funds in private accounts, it argues, to address a long-term funding shortfall.

But the report devotes considerable attention to an issue that has become increasingly troublesome for the administration: the loss of 2.8 million manufacturing jobs since Bush took office, and critics' claims that the administration's trade policies are partly to blame.

The report acknowledges that international trade and foreign outsourcing have contributed to the job slump. But it argues that technological progress and rising productivity — the ability to produce more goods with fewer workers — have played a bigger role than trade.

Although trade expansion inevitably hurts some workers, it says, the benefits will eventually outweigh the costs as Americans are able to buy goods and services at lower costs and as jobs are created in growing sectors of the economy.

The report endorses the relatively new phenomenon of outsourcing high-end white-collar work to India and other countries, a trend that has created concern within affected professions such as computer programming and medical diagnostics.

"The gains from trade that take place over the Internet or telephone lines are no different then the gains from trade in physical goods transported by ship or plane," it says. "When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically."

Bush's quick visit to Missouri — his 15th to what is considered a critical election battleground — was the first of several events intended to underscore recent economic improvements. Although job creation remains relatively sluggish, the nation's unemployment rate has fallen from 6.3% in June to 5.6% in January, and the economy grew at the fastest pace in 20 years during the last half of 2003.

The format, a Bush favorite, involved five SRC Automotive employees sharing a stage with the president to discuss their personal perspectives on the economy, with Bush often elaborating on their stories to tout various aspects of his economic agenda.

On Tuesday, Bush is scheduled to meet with economic leaders at the White House. On Thursday, he goes to Harrisburg, Pa., another key swing state that he has visited more than two dozen times.

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 9, 2004; 1:37 PM

The al Qaeda terrorist network has been trying to spark a "civil war" in Iraq among religious and ethnic groups in an effort to tear the country apart and prevent a transfer of sovereignty from U.S. occupation authorities to Iraqis, U.S. officials in Baghdad said today.

The officials said the plan was outlined in a 17-page letter that appealed to al Qaeda leaders outside Iraq for help in meeting the goals of the network's operatives inside the country. The letter was found in the possession of a "courier" who was trying to leave the country, the officials said. The existence of the document was first reported in today's New York Times.

The document outlines what is "clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence [and] try to expose fissures in this society," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. He told a news conference in Baghdad that U.S. authorities believe the document is "credible."

Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Washington that the letter shows anti-U.S. insurgents in Iraq "haven't given up." He told reporters, "They're trying to get more terrorists into Iraq and trying to create more terrorist organizations." He said the letter was "very revealing" about "the thinking of at least one part of the insurgency."

Kimmitt said the apparent author of the letter was Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who escaped from Afghanistan in 2001 after the fall of the radical Islamic Taliban government. Kimmitt said the author claims that he organized "25 operations" inside Iraq and may have been responsible for suicide bombings that have killed Shiite Muslim religious figures, ethnic Kurdish leaders, United Nations officials and Iraqi security forces and employees of the U.S.-led occupation authority.

"It is clear that the type of techniques that we have seen in certain of these attacks . . . have the fingerprints . . . of al Qaeda and other foreign fighters," Kimmitt said.

Much more at link

Russert: If the Iraqis choose, however, an Islamic extremist regime, would you accept that, and would that be better for the United States than Saddam Hussein?

President Bush: They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion.

I remember speaking to Mr. al Hakim here, who is a fellow who has lost 63 family members during the Saddam reign. His brother was one of the people that was assassinated early on in this past year. I expected to see a very bitter person. If 63 members of your family had been killed by a group of people, you would be a little bitter. He obviously was concerned, but he I said, you know, I'm a Methodist, what are my chances of success in your country and your vision? And he said, it's going to be a free society where you can worship freely. This is a Shiia fellow.

1. When Bush said flatly that he was "not surprised" by the level of resistance the U.S. has met in Iraq after the war, Russert did not ask: If that's true, why then did the U.S. not prepare much better for what would follow?

2. When Bush said the CIA was "ably led" by George Tenet and that Tenet's job was not in jeopardy, Russert did not ask: Why do you not hold Tenet at all accountable for deeply flawed CIA intelligence in the run up to a major war?

3. As a follow-up: Mr. President, What do you think of Tenet's comment that he never thought Iraq was an "imminent" threat? Or Colin Powell's remark earlier this week that he could not have justified the war if he knew the threat of weapons of mass destruction was not real?

4. When Bush flatly asserted "We're doing a very good job of dismantling Al-Quada," Russert did not challenge this notion at all.

5. Bush said one reason we had to go to war was because Saddam could have developed nuclear weapons "over time." Russert did not ask him to cite any fresh evidence that the Iraqi nuclear program was in any state to do this any time in the foreseeable future.

6. When Bush denied that he had launched a "pre-emptive" war because, after all, he went to the United Nations first, Russert did not ask: How did that make the invasion any less "pre-emptive?"

7. Bush claimed that we went to war because efforts at "containing" Saddam Hussein had failed. Russert did not ask for evidence that Hussein had not, in fact, been contained by sanctions, especially in light of no WMDs being found in Iraq.

8. Bush also repeatedly asserted that the United Nations had failed at "disarming Saddam Hussein peacefully" or that its efforts were "not working." Russert did not ask: How can you say this when, on the verge of war, U.N. inspectors were on the ground in Iraq and reporting that there appeared to be no WMDs there -- which, in fact, has been proven correct?

9. When Bush, responding to the "AWOL" controversy, twice chastened critics for downgrading the National Guard, Russert did not ask him to name a critic who was doing that (as opposed to questioning Bush's specific record with the Guard).

10. Finally, Russert did not ask Bush what he thought of the many serious charges in the recent book about former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill.

BIG TEN TIME!

..In a written statement, Kerry called on Bush to testify before the intelligence commission he has appointed to investigate the prewar intelligence.

"This morning on 'Meet the Press,' President Bush said that his decision to go to war with Iraq when he did was because Saddam Hussein had, quote, 'the ability to make weapons,' " Kerry told reporters at the news conference.

"This is a far cry from what the president and his administration told the American people throughout 2002. Back then, President Bush repeatedly told the American people that Saddam Hussein, quote, 'has got chemical weapons.'

"They told us they could deploy those weapons within 45 minutes to do injury to our troops," Kerry said. "They told us they had aerial vehicles and the capacity to deliver those weapons through the air. And it was on that basis that he sent America's sons and daughters marching off to war."

Bush said on "Meet the Press" that he had "expected to find the weapons," but that his decision to go to war was really "based upon that intelligence in the context of the war against terror."

But Kerry said that the U.S. intelligence community apparently had its own questions about whether Iraq had such weapons.

"The problem is not just that he is changing his story now -- it is that it appears he was telling the American people stories in 2002," Kerry said. "He told America that Iraq had chemical weapons two months after his own Defense Intelligence Agency told him that there was, quote, 'no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons.' "

Asked about his support for a Senate resolution making war an option, Kerry responded, "We voted for a process" with assurance from the Bush administration that weapons of mass destruction were "the only rationale for going to war."

Kerry said he and other lawmakers pushed the administration to build a "legitimate global coalition" and "honor" the process of U.N. weapons inspections by giving it time to find answers.

"I noticed today the president said he made the decision to go to the U.N. Let's not revise history completely. We forced the president to go to the U.N. We pushed the president to go to the U.N," he said.

Kerry accused the administration of picking and choosing intelligence that promoted its position while leaving out "clear evidence to the contrary."

Bush, however, said in his "Meet the Press" interview that "Congress saw the same intelligence I had, and they looked at exactly what I looked at, and they made an informed judgment based upon the information that I had."

Kerry said he questions whether the United Nations would now trust U.S. intelligence on any other country. There is an "urgency" to get answers, he said.

He reiterated his call for Bush to have "a legitimate and immediate investigation into the extraordinary failure of intelligence or to help explain to the American people whether there were politics in the development of that intelligence."

"It ought to be done in a matter of months," Kerry said.

"I ask the president to take responsibility and set the record straight and immediately convene people who can give those answers to the American people," he said.

In a written statement, Kerry called on Bush "in light of his new information today" to "immediately agree to testify before his intelligence commission."

Bush said on NBC that he'd be glad to visit the commission but would not testify.

President Bush: If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.

And the other thing that I think it's important for people who watch the expenditures side of the equation is to understand we are at war, Tim, and any time you commit your troops into harm's way, they must have the best equipment, the best training, and the best possible pay. That's where we owe it to their loved ones.

01-30-2004

Inadequate Convoy Security in Iraq

Concerned civilian contract employees working in Kuwait and Iraq are complaining to SFTT.org that there is inadequate security for truck convoys bringing military equipment and supplies into Iraq from Kuwait.

One former security official said:

"Please keep in mind that on these convoys, the drivers are 3rd country nationals (TCNs) from India, the Philippines, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc. They have no training in convoy security procedures and carry no weapons. The only protection is from the military escort vehicles, one in the front and one in the rear. If the convoy consist of more than 30 vehicles an additional escort vehicle is provided. [W]e're not allowed to carry weapons."

"It is sad that we put soldiers/contractors in harms way without giving them the tools to succeed."

I don't know how it plays out in real life, but on paper it's brutal.

Bush has this very weird, very very harsh speaking style.

His speech is full of repetitive cadence, he'll often utter two consecutive preliminary sentences that don't have any significant content, but are basically the same. Or he'll make contradictory statements, without any admission that they're contradictory:

"And so we ? I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. And when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went."

In this passage, note the repetitions in three lines. David Kay twice, stockpiles twice, weapons three times.

And note the disconnects. 'I expected stockpiles'. The next sentence though, doesn't refer to stockpiles, it confirms capacity. But capacity isn't asserted or at issue. So only then does it go to acknowledging no stockpiles, and then it qualifies with 'theories as to where the weapons went' which implies through the backdoor that there are stockpiles.

To give you an idea as to how lunatic this is, consider this semantically identical statement: "We expected there to be cows. We confirmed that there were hamsters. There are no cows, but there will be cows."

And note the grammatical faux pas. This is another continuing feature in Bush's speech. He's continually mangling his syntax, inverting tenses, changing his thought in the middle of a sentence, breaking off sentences, revising and amending as he speaks. The overall effect is to make it extremely difficult to understand or follow where he's going. It's like taking a 4x4 over a bumpy dirt road without shocks, after a while, its just one lurch after another.

Here's another amazing passage:

"But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world."

Saddam is repeated three times. Weapons is repeated three times. Dangerous is repeated four times.

The passage is devoid of any semantic content whatsoever. It doesn't mean anything, it's not about anything. It's just continual button pressing. "Saddam/ Weapons/ Danger Danger"

Here's another irrational passage, but slightly more subtle:

"And I made the decision to go to the United Nations. By the way, quoting a lot of their data in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by"

Note the complete breakdown of pronouns here. Them/You/He/I/Us. It's almost incoherent. But if you spend some time unravelling the structure... What he says is:

"Them (the UN) believed in wmd. Them are you. You believed in wmd's. I and Us are the same. We can't stand by. It's still incoherent. But it at least reverts back to a tribal code drum beat.

Note the complete semantic lunacy of this passage: "this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand" Who's the actor here, where's the motivation, what's the subject, what does this sentence mean?

Here's an amazing compounding of negatives:

"Well, but what wasn't wrong was the fact that he had the ability to make a weapon. That wasn't right."

Again, I don't know what this means.

This is anti-rational thinking. Bush has perfected a mode of speech which seems antithetical to logic. It explicitly disconnects concepts, separates ideas and prevents them from linking coherently. It's a sort of speech which appears tailor made to break down any capacity for thought, it operates on the level of word association and visceral gut reaction.

I can't decide which is worse: That this is the way this man actually thinks, which has horrifying implications considering he's President. Or that this man is deliberately doing this to prevent us from appreciating or thinking.[Global sic]

"I don't think they're mainstream at all, and I think Americans want change and want to move in a stronger position for our country."

"I want to give a very special thank you to the state of Washington and the state of Michigan for giving us great victories today. We are deeply appreciative for that.

"A great message is being sent across the country from Michigan and Washington state, the same message that was sent in Iowa and New Hampshire and Missouri and other states across this country. And that is the same message that I'm carrying to Virginia and to Tennessee and to the rest of this country and that message is, 'George Bush's days are numbered and change is on the way.'"

He said the current administration has abandoned "mainstream values" to pursue policies "fundamentally at odds with our history."

Kerry told supporters, who cheered loudly, that America is going in the wrong direction and, if elected, he would "turn it around from the radical course that George Bush and his extreme friends are taking us."

The Massachusetts senator said President Bush has weakened the country both at home and abroad, by running up record budget deficits and overextending the military.

Kerry, known to be an aggressive campaigner, said he was prepared for attacks by what he called "the Republican smear machine," saying, "I am one Democrat who knows how to fight back and I've only just begun to fight."

Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie has attacked Kerry's Senate record on national security issues, while carefully acknowledging his service as a decorated Navy officer in Vietnam.

"This week George Bush and the Republican smear machine have begun to trot out the same old lines of attack, Kerry said. "They've used those lines of attack to try to blur the real issues before this country. They've used this to divide us before and I have news this time for George Bush and Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie and the rest of their friends, I am not going to back down."

Prior to the event, and his victories, Kerry spent the day painting Bush as an extremist.

Ten Links: Weekend Edition

Undersea eruptions of noxious hydrogen sulphide are having a major impact on one of the world's richest fisheries. Satellite images show that toxic eruptions off the coast of Namibia are more frequent and widespread than anyone realised.

The world's most productive fisheries are found in upwelling regions of ocean, where wind-driven currents fertilise surface waters with nutrients from the deep. The Benguela upwelling along Namibia's coast has the strongest such currents in the world. The area supports a fishery that was worth around $400 million in 1998, providing Namibia with its second largest source of revenue after mining.

But trouble bubbles beneath these productive waters. Microscopic algae called diatoms grow where upwelling is most intense. These are grazed by plankton, but any that are not eaten sink when they die, forming beds of sediment on the seafloor.

Bacteria in the sediments break down the diatoms and produce hydrogen sulphide in the process. The sulphide builds up in gas pockets that eventually erupt into the ocean, poisoning marine life and stripping oxygen from the water.

A better bet for scouring your hard disk clean may be independent programs. The ones I found worked pretty well from all sorts of places (like the Windows registry).

The best bargain was "Ad-aware," popular with many readers, as I learned from the e-mail I got after last week's column.

"Ad-aware 6.0," available to home users for free from http://www.LavaSoftUSA.com, is easy to use. It lets you sort programs and files by type or adware company, so you can see the program it is proposing to delete. It eliminated annoyances such as a toolbar cluttering up Internet Explorer that kept returning even after I told Explorer not to display it.

"Ad-aware" tracked down traces of adware I thought I had removed, and eliminated two viruses that had gotten on the PC because the owner had not kept his virus checker up to date.

pure bs opinion piece. Not hard news!!

Cinnamon Stillwell

In the wake of David Kay?s findings (or lack thereof) in Iraq, President Bush has been enduring withering criticism from Democrats, who are desperate to steer the controversy into the realm of conspiracy rather than intelligence failure. But it isn?t just from the left flank that Bush finds himself under attack. In fact, members of his own party are beginning to chime in, only their concerns are of an entirely different nature. Bush?s runaway spending, huge government entitlement programs, and ill-conceived guest worker proposal are all extremely unpopular with Republicans, and they are beginning to make their displeasure known.

Republicans are not stingy about funding national security and the visionary among their ranks also support expanding the space program. But the Republican Party is known for fiscal responsibility, and that?s something that has been in short supply lately in the Bush administration. And on first glance, the budget proposal for 2005 promises more of the same. At some point, the president has to just say no.

The Medicare bill, which wasn't easy for conservatives to swallow in the first place, now turns out to be even costlier than promised. Bush now has to justify the necessity for this giant entitlement program yet again, but this time to a roomful of hostile Republicans. And a recently proposed $18 million dollar budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), isn?t helping matters.

Bush?s guest worker proposal (which he stubbornly insists isn?t an amnesty, but everyone knows it is) is not only unpopular among Republicans, but Americans as a whole. In the last poll, over 70\% of Americans were in favor of limiting illegal and legal immigration, not increasing it. And that?s exactly what Bush?s plan will do. Since his speech announcing the proposal, the numbers of illegals crossing the border has increased exponentially. Then there?s the small matter of national security, which means nothing when our borders are sieves. Americans understand all this, so why doesn?t President Bush?

The most popular theory is that Bush?s chief strategist, Karl Rove, is trying to steal the Democrats? thunder. By taking away all their platforms--big government, social programs, increased immigration--Bush puts them in the unenviable position of arguing against their own constituency. But when does this trade-off become counterproductive? At a certain point, Republicans may start to feel that they are simply voting for what is essentially another Democrat.

But Republicans frustrated with Bush?s policies have virtually nowhere else to turn. They don?t want to run the risk of letting a Democrat win the presidential election in November, but on principle, they are ready to bolt. And a few have done just that. More than one Republican has switched their political affiliation to Independent, while others are focusing on rising stars within the Republican Party. A write-in option for Tom Tancredo, the staunchly anti-illegal-immigration Colorado Congressman, has been rumored, and some conservative Christians in the party say they would support Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore should he choose to run. Tancredo and Moore don?t have the mass support to win the presidency, but they could pull away a good chunk of Bush?s voters and do some real damage in the process.

The stakes are high in the next presidential election and the fact is many Republicans are terrified at the prospect of a Democrat inhabiting the White House at this time. It?s likely that the War on Terrorism and national security will take precedence and win Bush the day. But it?s also a possibility that if he doesn?t watch his step, alienated Republicans could pull the rug out from under him.

For all of our sakes, let?s hope President Bush starts getting back in touch with his base.

IT'S TEN TIME!

Critics charged that the commission was unlikely to tackle some of the most politically sensitive areas of inquiry, including allegations that administration officials pressured intelligence analysts and distorted intelligence findings to boost the case for war. Administration critics also would like to see an investigation into the administration's prewar claims about an as-yet-to-be-proved link between Iraq and al-Qaida terrorists.

"If (Saddam) Hussein and al-Qaida were not allied, then Iraq was not a direct threat to the United States ... regardless of its WMD capabilities," said Charles Pena, the director of defense policy at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research center.

"The commission has been told to ignore the elephant in the middle of the room, which is how the intelligence was used and misused by President Bush, Vice President (Dick) Cheney and other senior administration officials," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.

Pena of Cato said the commission appeared to be "an effort to scapegoat" the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

"The commission is bipartisan, but that doesn't tell you anything," Pena said. "This is not a commission that is going to be extremely critical of the administration."

Silberman is known as a tough-minded conservative who never shies from a dispute. He was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan and had been considered a top contender for Supreme Court slots that Reagan and the first President Bush filled.

In 1991, Silberman denied reports that he'd threatened to punch Judge Abner Mikva during a dispute over an affirmative action case.

In a letter published in Legal Times, Silberman said he told Mikva, "If you were 10 years younger I would be tempted to punch you in the nose." Silberman added that Mikva "did not become 10 years younger," and said the two never came to blows.

Robb, a son-in-law of former President Lyndon Johnson through his wife, Lynda, long has advocated a tough policy toward Saddam.

As a member of the Senate in 1998, Robb advocated lifting an executive order banning political assassinations, as a warning to Saddam. At the time, he said he considered Iraq "far more dangerous than I think the American people fully appreciate."

Robb, who lost a 2000 re-election campaign to Republican Sen. George Allen, is now a professor at George Mason University in Virginia.