2004: The Year of 'The Passion'

2004: The Year of 'The Passion'
By FRANK RICH

Will it be the Jews' fault if "The Passion of the Christ," ignored by the Golden Globes this week, comes up empty in the Oscar nominations next month? Why, of course.

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, explained in a colloquy on the subject recently convened by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC. "It's not a secret, O.K.?" Mr. Donohue continued. "And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth." After the show's token (and conservative) Jewish panelist, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, pointed out that "Michael Moore is certainly not a Jew" and that Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas are not "Jewish names," Mr. Donohue responded: "I like Harvey Weinstein. How's that? Harvey Weinstein is my friend."

How's that? Not quite good enough. Surely Mr. Donohue knows that decorum in these situations requires that he cite a Jew as one of his "best friends," not merely a friend. For shame.

As we close the books on 2004, and not a moment too soon, it's clear that, as far as the culture goes, this year belonged to Mel Gibson's mammoth hit. Its prurient and interminable wallow in the Crucifixion, to the point where Jesus' actual teachings become mere passing footnotes to the sumptuously depicted mutilation of his flesh, is as representative of our time as "Godspell" was of terminal-stage hippiedom 30 years ago. The Gibson conflation of religion with violence reflects the universal order of the day -- whether the verbal fisticuffs of the culture war within America, as exemplified by Mr. Donohue's rant on national television or, far more lethally, the savagery of the actual war that radical Islam brought to our doorstep on 9/11.

"The Passion" is a one-size-fits-all touchstone, it seems. It didn't just excite and anger a lot of moviegoers in our own country but also broke box-office records abroad, including in the Middle East. Most Arab governments censor films that depict prophets (Jesus included), even banning recent benign Hollywood products like the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty" and the animated musical "Prince of Egypt." But an exception was made for Mr. Gibson's blood fest nearly everywhere. It was seen in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Among the satisfied customers last spring was Yasser Arafat, who called the film "moving and historical" -- a thumb's up that has not, to my knowledge, yet surfaced in the film's low-key Oscar campaign.

Arafat's animus was clear enough; an aide said at the time that he likened Jesus' suffering, as depicted in "The Passion," to that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Our domestic culture war over religion is not so easily explained.

You'd think peace might reign in a nation where there is so much unanimity of faith. In Newsweek's "Birth of Jesus" holiday cover article -- not to be confused with Time's competing "Secrets of the Nativity" cover -- a poll found that 84 percent of American adults call themselves Christian, 82 percent see Jesus as the son of God, and 79 percent believe in the Virgin Birth. Though by a far slimmer margin, the presidential election reinstalled a chief executive who ostentatiously invokes a Christian Almighty. As for "The Passion of the Christ," it achieved the monetary landslide of a $370 million domestic gross (second only to the cartoon saviors Shrek and Spider-Man).

Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you'll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti-Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of "The Passion," his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot -- of secularists, "secular Jews" and "elites" -- out to destroy the religion followed by more than four out of every five Americans.

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest -- and has to be dealt with."

If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, WalMart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O'Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a "holiday tree" in the lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion -- you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

The power of this minority within the Christian majority comes from its exaggerated claims on the Bush election victory. It is enhanced further by a news culture, especially on television, that gives the Mel Gibson wing of Christianity more say than other Christian voices and that usually ignores minority religions altogether. This is not just a Fox phenomenon. Something is off when NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," mainstream TV shows both, invite religious leaders to discuss "values" in the aftermath of the election and limit that discussion to all-male panels composed exclusively of either evangelical ministers or politicians with pseudo-spiritual credentials. Does Mr. Falwell, who after 9/11 blamed Al Qaeda's attack partly on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," speak for any sizable group of American Christians? Does the Rev. Al Sharpton, booked on TV as a "balance" to Mr. Falwell, do so either? Mr. Sharpton doesn't even have a congregation; like Mr. Falwell, he is a politician first, a religious leader second (or maybe fourth or fifth).

Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice -- fundamentalist." That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers -- or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves -- and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has attributed to "values" crusaders since the election. "There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners," says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."

This paradigm is everywhere in our news culture. When Jon Stewart went on CNN's "Crossfire" to demand that its hosts stop "hurting America" by turning news and political debate into a form of pro wrestling, it may have sounded a bit hyperbolic. "Crossfire" is an aging show that few watch. But his broader point holds up: it's all crossfire now. In the electronic news sphere where most Americans live much of the time, anyone who refuses to engage in combat is quickly sent packing as a bore.

Toss the issue of religion into that 24/7 wrestling match, as into any conflict in human history, and the incendiary possibilities are limitless. When even phenomena as innocuous as Oscar nominations or the lighting of a Christmas tree can be inflated into divisive religious warfare, it's only a matter of time before someone uncovers an anti-Christian plot in "White Christmas." It avoids any mention of religion and it was, as William Donohue might be the first to point out, written by a secular Jew.

From The New York Times, December 16, 2004

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Editor's note:

It should also be pointed out that the most famous Christmas songs were written by Jews, so perhaps these non-compassionate right wing nuts who clearly do not follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, should start preaching that everyone must immediately stop singing almost every popular Christmas song, and make the radio stations stop playing them and the performers in theaters and on Television stop performing them and recording them and selling millions of Christmas CDs and DVDs. That would eliminate almost all the Christmas songs, eliminate almost all of the Christmas shows, eliminate all the Christmas shopping commercials.

Hey! Wait a minute. Christmas is, after all, synonymous with stores doing everything they can to remove your hard-earned money from your wallet! Eliminating all the Christmas commercials, overplayed Christmas songs, and such might actually stop all the hype. Then Christmas will stop being an in-your-face commecialized event, and once again be the religious and personal day it is supposed to be for Christians. What a concept!

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The Great Social Security Debate

The Great Social Security Debate
From the MSNBC Answer Desk
By John W. Schoen

We keep hearing "privatizing social security" or "letting young people invest in private funds". What does this really mean? My understanding is that Social Security is a pay as you go program and if you divert those funds that we'll have to borrow to pay retirees today? Can you please clarify this.
Linda B. -- Amelia, OH

Despite lots of noise, there’s been very little clarity in the current debate surrounding the federal retirement program that Americans have relied on since it was set up more than 65 years ago. And the debate is really two debates. The first centers on the question of whether Social Security is “going broke.” The second is over the more ideological question: Who should be managing your retirement savings, you or Uncle Sam?

The first question is pretty straightforward, even though much of what you’re hearing these days is simply dead wrong. While the Social Security system is in need of another overhaul (similar to the one it got in 1983), the fund is hardly “going broke.”



This year’s report by the trustees who oversee the fundfound that, if left alone, the Social Security system will continue to be able to pay its bills for at least the next 40 years — thanks in part to a $1.4 trillion nest egg of Treasury securities that has been stashed away over the past several decades. (A separate analysis by the Congressional Budget Office figures the fund is in good shape until 2052.)

True, some of the money to be paid to soon-to-be-retired Baby Boomers will have to come from future payments from younger workers. But a big chunk of the bill has already been set aside. And by 2015, the amount set aside in the trust fund will swell to five times the estimated annual payouts. So the idea that Boomers will somehow be sponging off the next generation for all of their retirement funds just isn't true. (Full disclosure: We're on the Boomer side of the ledger.)

So what happens after the 2044? By law, the trustees are required to make a 75-year forecast — which, of course, is virtually impossible to do reliably. (Who, when the fund was originally set up, could have forecast World War II, the Great Inflation of the 1970s, and the Internet bubble?) Still, even if no changes are made until 2078, the trustees figure that the amount of money going into the fund would pay 73 cents of every dollar of projected payouts by that year. (The six-member Board of Trustees, by the way, includes Treasury Secretary John Snow, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, and departing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.)

You could make up that future shortfall, the trustees said, with either an increase in taxes today, or a cut in benefits (maybe by asking people to wait a little longer to retire.) Or a little of both. It wouldn’t be the first time the system needed to be tweaked. When the fund last got off track (largely because of the prolonged, painful inflation of the 1970s), the Reagan administration and Congress put together a relatively small tax increase, raising the amount paid by employers and workers from 5.4 percent each in 1983 to the current 6.2 percent.

So, all in all, it doesn't looks to us like Uncle Sam is doing such a bad job of managing your retirement funds. But if that’s true, then why are we hearing all these dire predictions — from those who want to “reform” Social Security — that the sky is falling? The answer brings us to the second question behind the current debate.

What today’s Social Security “reformers” really want is to get Uncle Sam out of the business of taxing workers and employers to pay for retirement — and further cut taxes. But since the Bush administration’s trillion-dollar, first-term tax cut left the federal budget deep in the red, it’s going to be pretty hard to find ways to keep cutting taxes without going after Social Security.

The bigger question is this: Even if you believe philosophically that Uncle Sam should get out of the business of managing retirement funds, how do you “privatize” a system that still relies — at least partly — on payments from younger workers to balance the books? The answer is you either have to cut benefits or make up the difference with a huge, lump-sum payment now.

Since the details of the plan haven't been formally proposed, it's impossible to know how big that lump sum would have to be. It could be $1 trillion. Or $3 trillion. No one really knows until the details are formalized. But with the federal budget already coming up short by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, it's not a great time for the government to be spending even more money that it doesn't have.

What’s more, the “privatization” of retirement savings is already well underway — ever since Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, which established the first tax-deferred Individual Retirement Accounts. Those plans, and their cousins, employer-sponsored 401(k) accounts, seem to be working just fine. Americans have already socked away an estimated $1.9 trillion in 401(k) plans (according to the Chicago-based Spectrem Group) and another $3 trillion in Individual Retirement Accounts. That means there's roughly three times as much money in private retirement accounts as there is in the Social Security trust fund.

The big difference, of course, is that Uncle Sam forces you to put money away for a rainy day, while existing private accounts are strictly voluntary. For a nation force-fed on credit by the financial services industry, involuntary savings may not be such a bad idea.

Private plans also have other pitfalls compared to Social Security. For starters, managing a retirement fund may not be for everyone: Just ask anyone whose 401(k) plan was heavily invested in tech stocks in 2000. (For more drawbacks to privatizing Social Security check out: Twelve Reasons Why Privatizing Social Security is a Bad Idea, a report by The Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank, formerly called the Twentieth Century Fund, that opposes Social Security privatization.)

Perhaps the biggest unseen cost of the current debate over the future of Social Security is the distraction it’s created from the much bigger problems facing Medicare — which is in serious trouble. The longer Congress and the White House wait to overhaul the massive U.S. public health care program, the sicker it will get.

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CIA's prison within a prison at Gitmo

CIA's prison within a prison at Gitmo
Secret facility holds some al Qaeda detainees

By Dana Priest and Scott Higham
The Washington Post
Updated: 12:59 a.m. ET Dec. 17, 2004

Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.

The buildings used by the CIA are shrouded by high fences covered with thick green mesh plastic and ringed with floodlights, officials said. They sit within the larger Camp Echo complex, which was erected to house the Defense Department's high-value detainees and those awaiting military trials on terrorism charges.

The facility has housed detainees from Pakistan, West Africa, Yemen and other countries under the strictest secrecy, the sources said. "People are constantly leaving and coming," said one U.S. official who visited the base in recent months. It is unclear whether the facility is still in operation today. The CIA and the Defense Department declined to comment.

Most international terrorism suspects in U.S. custody are held not by the CIA but by the Defense Department at the Guantanamo Bay prison. They are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.

CIA detainees, by contrast, are held under separate rules and far greater secrecy. Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment. The roster of CIA prisoners is not public, but current and former U.S. intelligence officials say the agency holds the most valuable al Qaeda leaders and many mid-level members with knowledge of the group's logistics, financing and regional operations.

The CIA facility at the Guantanamo Bay prison was constructed over the past year as the agency confronted one of its toughest emerging problems: where to hold terrorists for interrogations that could last for years.

During the 1990s, the CIA typically had custody of half a dozen terrorists at any time and usually kept them in foreign prisons, mostly in Egypt and Jordan. But just two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, CIA paramilitary teams working with foreign intelligence services had arrested dozens of people thought to have knowledge of upcoming attacks on the United States.

The CIA is believed to be holding about three dozen al Qaeda leaders in undisclosed locations, U.S. national security officials say. Among them are pivotal Sept. 11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida and the leader of Southeast Asia's Islamic terrorist movement, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, who is also known as Hambali.

CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean.

Maintaining facilities in foreign countries is difficult, however, said current and former CIA officials. Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida were believed to have been taken to Thailand immediately after capture. The Thai government eventually insisted that they be transferred elsewhere.

"People are willing to help but not to hold," said one CIA veteran of counterterrorism operations.

Strings attached
The U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay thus provided the CIA with an isolated venue devoid of the sensitive international politics. But it came with strings attached.

The U.S. military, which controls the base, required the agency to register all detainees, abide by military detention standards and permit the ICRC some level of access.

"If you're going to be in my back yard, you're going to have to abide by my rules" is how one defense official explained it.

Army officials investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal concluded that the CIA had held "ghost detainees" at the prison, inmates who were not registered or officially acknowledged, a violation of military rules.

Asked about the arrangement with the CIA at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he could not comment on operations of other agencies. "As we have stated since the beginning of detention operations at Guantanamo, the ICRC has access to detainees at Guantanamo and is permitted to meet with them, consistent with military necessity," Whitman said in a statement. Pentagon policy "is that all [Defense] detainees, including those at Guantanamo, are treated humanely, and in accordance with applicable law," the statement continued.

One U.S. official knowledgeable about the arrangement with the ICRC considered it a positive step forward. "There is no one in Gitmo who is not identified," he said, using Guantanamo Bay's nickname.

Red Cross officials declined to say where they had been permitted to visit, or whom. "We have been granted broad access to the camp," the ICRC said in a prepared statement. "We are confident we have visited all of the people detained at Guantanamo, in all of the places they are being detained."

The CIA has worked at Guantanamo Bay since the early days of the prison camps, which opened in January 2002 when the first men captured in the Afghan war where transferred to a collection of chain-link cages called Camp X-Ray. The CIA has kept an office at the Navy base and takes part in interrogation sessions of Defense Department detainees alongside FBI agents, military intelligence officers and others in what are called Tiger Teams.

Many of the interrogations have been conducted inside trailers set up within the perimeter of Camp Delta, a more permanent compound of steel cages that took the place of Camp X-Ray by the end of 2003.

'Off-limits to nearly everyone'
The facility used by the CIA is in Camp Echo, which also houses high-value military detainees. The camp consists of more than a dozen single-story concrete-block huts built away from the main prison complex. Each hut is divided in half. Inside is a steel cage, a restroom, and a table for interviews and interrogations, according to sources familiar with the facility.

The CIA's facility has been "off-limits to nearly everyone on the base," said one military official familiar with operations at Guantanamo Bay.

One of the huts at Camp Echo has been occupied by a detainee named Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, according to one source familiar with the new compound. Slahi, a Mauritanian businessman, acted as the liaison between a group of Islamic radicals living in Hamburg and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to the Sept. 11 commission.

According to statements given by the key plotter, Binalshibh, Slahi persuaded the men to go to Afghanistan, rather than Chechnya, to fight.

He arranged their travel and for them to meet al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, who in turn arranged a meeting between Binalshibh and bin Laden.

Slahi was arrested by secret police in Mauritania during the night on Sept. 27, 2001, members of his family told local media at the time. By December, he was in U.S. custody.

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Buying Into Failure

The New York Times
December 17, 2004

Buying Into Failure
By PAUL KRUGMAN

As the Bush administration tries to persuade America to convert Social Security into a giant 401(k), we can learn a lot from other countries that have already gone down that road.

Information about other countries' experience with privatization isn't hard to find. For example, the Century Foundation, at www.tcf.org, provides a wide range of links.

Yet, aside from giving the Cato Institute and other organizations promoting Social Security privatization the space to present upbeat tales from Chile, the U.S. news media have provided their readers and viewers with little information about international experience. In particular, the public hasn't been let in on two open secrets:

Privatization dissipates a large fraction of workers' contributions on fees to investment companies.

It leaves many retirees in poverty.

Decades of conservative marketing have convinced Americans that government programs always create bloated bureaucracies, while the private sector is always lean and efficient. But when it comes to retirement security, the opposite is true. More than 99 percent of Social Security's revenues go toward benefits, and less than 1 percent for overhead. In Chile's system, management fees are around 20 times as high. And that's a typical number for privatized systems.

These fees cut sharply into the returns individuals can expect on their accounts. In Britain, which has had a privatized system since the days of Margaret Thatcher, alarm over the large fees charged by some investment companies eventually led government regulators to impose a "charge cap." Even so, fees continue to take a large bite out of British retirement savings.

A reasonable prediction for the real rate of return on personal accounts in the U.S. is 4 percent or less. If we introduce a system with British-level management fees, net returns to workers will be reduced by more than a quarter. Add in deep cuts in guaranteed benefits and a big increase in risk, and we're looking at a "reform" that hurts everyone except the investment industry.

Advocates insist that a privatized U.S. system can keep expenses much lower. It's true that costs will be low if investments are restricted to low-overhead index funds - that is, if government officials, not individuals, make the investment decisions. But if that's how the system works, the suggestions that workers will have control over their own money - two years ago, Cato renamed its Project on Social Security Privatization by replacing "privatization" with "choice" - are false advertising.

And if there are rules restricting workers to low-expense investments, investment industry lobbyists will try to get those rules overturned.

For the record, I don't think giving financial corporations a huge windfall is the main motive for privatization; it's mostly an ideological thing. But that windfall is a major reason Wall Street wants privatization, and everyone else should be very suspicious.

Then there's the issue of poverty among the elderly.

Privatizers who laud the Chilean system never mention that it has yet to deliver on its promise to reduce government spending. More than 20 years after the system was created, the government is still pouring in money. Why? Because, as a Federal Reserve study puts it, the Chilean government must "provide subsidies for workers failing to accumulate enough capital to provide a minimum pension." In other words, privatization would have condemned many retirees to dire poverty, and the government stepped back in to save them.

The same thing is happening in Britain. Its Pensions Commission warns that those who think Mrs. Thatcher's privatization solved the pension problem are living in a "fool's paradise." A lot of additional government spending will be required to avoid the return of widespread poverty among the elderly - a problem that Britain, like the U.S., thought it had solved.

Britain's experience is directly relevant to the Bush administration's plans. If current hints are an indication, the final plan will probably claim to save money in the future by reducing guaranteed Social Security benefits. These savings will be an illusion: 20 years from now, an American version of Britain's commission will warn that big additional government spending is needed to avert a looming surge in poverty among retirees.

So the Bush administration wants to scrap a retirement system that works, and can be made financially sound for generations to come with modest reforms. Instead, it wants to buy into failure, emulating systems that, when tried elsewhere, have neither saved money nor protected the elderly from poverty.

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Fiddling as Iraq Burns

The New York Times
December 17, 2004

Fiddling as Iraq Burns
By BOB HERBERT

The White House seems to have slipped the bonds of simple denial and escaped into the disturbing realm of utter delusion. On Tuesday, there was President Bush hanging the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who slept through the run-up to Sept. 11 and then did the president and the nation the great disservice of declaring that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

It was a fatal misjudgment.

Another Medal of Freedom was given to Paul Bremer III, the chief civilian administrator of the American occupation, who made the heavily criticized decision to disband the defeated Iraqi Army and presided over an ever-worsening security situation. Thousands upon thousands have died in this unnecessary and incompetently conducted war, yet here was the president handing out medals as if some kind of triumph had been achieved. If these guys could get the highest civilian award, what honor is left for someone who actually does a good job?

A third medal was given to Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, which Mr. Bush, in his peculiar way, has characterized as a "catastrophic success." It's an interesting term. Some people have applied it to the president's run for re-election.

By anyone's standards, terrible things are happening in Iraq, and no amount of self-congratulation in Washington can take the edge off the horror being endured by American troops or the unrelenting agony of the Iraqi people. The disconnect between the White House's fantasyland and the world of war in Iraq could hardly have been illustrated more starkly than by a pair of front-page articles in The New York Times on Dec. 10. The story at the top of the page carried the headline: "It's Inauguration Time Again, and Access Still Has Its Price - $250,000 Buys Lunch With President and More."

The headline on the story beneath it said: "Armor Scarce for Heavy Trucks Transporting U.S. Cargo in Iraq."

This administration has many things on its mind besides the welfare of overstretched, ill-equipped G.I.'s dodging bombers and snipers in Iraq. In addition to the inauguration, which will cost tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush is busy with his obsessive campaign against "junk and frivolous lawsuits," his effort to further lighten the tax load on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, and his campaign to cut the legs from under the proudest achievement of the New Deal, Social Security.

So much for America's wartime priorities.

Even domestic security gets short shrift. During the Republican convention, Mr. Bush said, "I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country." Try squaring that with the Bernard Kerik fiasco, in which the administration's background check of its candidate for the nation's ultimate domestic security post was handled with the same calamitous incompetence as the intelligence effort that led to the war in Iraq.

Mr. Bush's pick (at Rudy Giuliani's urging) for homeland security secretary turned out to be a slick character who had once ducked a required F.B.I. clearance, had a social relationship with the owner of a company suspected of business ties to organized crime figures and had rented a love nest that overlooked the ruins of the World Trade Center.

"I'm Not Perfect," said a headline next to Mr. Kerik's picture in Tuesday's New York Post.

You wonder, with so much at stake, where to look in the Bush constellation for the care and competence that the times call for. Colin Powell is heading toward the exit, to be replaced by Condoleezza Rice, who did her best to petrify the nation with loose talk about mushroom clouds. Dick Cheney would still have us believe in a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The man who took the lead in vetting Bernie Kerik, the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, was also the point person in the administration's bid to duck the constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and even to justify torture.

Mr. Gonzales is a favorite of the president, who has nominated him to be attorney general and may someday appoint him to the Supreme Court.

Medals anyone? The president may actually believe that this crowd is the best and brightest America has to offer. Which is disturbing.

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Presidential Medals of Failure

washingtonpost.com
Presidential Medals of Failure

By Richard Cohen

Thursday, December 16, 2004; Page A37

Where's Kerik?

This is the question I asked myself as, one by one, the pictures of the latest Presidential Medal of Freedom awardees flashed by on my computer screen. First came George Tenet, the former CIA director and the man who had assured President Bush that it was a "slam-dunk" that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Then came L. Paul Bremer, the former viceroy of Iraq, who disbanded the Iraqi army and ousted Baathists from government jobs, therefore contributing mightily to the current chaos in that country. Finally came retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the architect of the plan whereby the United States sent too few troops to Iraq.

One by one these images flicked by me, each man wearing the royal-blue velvet ribbon with the ornate medal -- one failure after another, each now on the lecture circuit, telling insurance agents and other good people what really happened when they were in office, but withholding such wisdom from the American people until, for even more money, their book deals are negotiated. (Franks has already completed this stage of his life. His book, "American Soldier," was a bestseller.)

I braced myself. Could Bernard Kerik be next? Would we skip the entire process of maladministration, misjudgments in office and sycophantic admiration of the current president and go straight to the celebrated failure? After all, what seems to matter most to this president is not performance -- certainly not excellence -- but a matey kind of loyalty and obsequiousness, of which Kerik had plenty.

"Bernie," Bush called out at a White House ceremony last year.

Kerik, who was walking away, stopped. "Yes, sir," he said.

"You're a good man," the president said.

It is this manly affection that explains how Kerik came to be nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security. The president liked him. He was the president's kind of guy: a wayward, messy kind of youth and then -- wow! -- this explosive career, coming out of the starting gate like Seabiscuit, another runt with something less than an elite East Coast pedigree. What's more, he had been recommended by Rudy Giuliani, another very tough guy who, everyone somehow forgot, is a man hobbled by awful judgment, in people as well as in himself.

Had the president given the awards a moment's thought, he might have asked himself what he was doing. A pretty good argument can be made that Tenet was incompetent. He not only failed to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 but he failed to protect the president from what has to be a historic embarrassment: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

As for Franks and Bremer, they cannot -- on the face of it -- both deserve medals. Since coming home from Iraq, Bremer has said the United States did not use enough troops there. "We never had enough troops on the ground," he confided to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers in October. This allowed the looting that broke out shortly after Baghdad was captured and the subsequent insurgency. For the record, Franks -- prodded by Donald Rumsfeld -- is the guy who never had enough troops on the ground. Which one deserved the medal? Easy. Neither.

The White House medal ceremony was really about George W. Bush. It had a slight touch of the absurd to it, as if facts do not matter and failure does not count. The War to Rid Iraq of WMD has now become The War to Bring Democracy to the Middle East. No one is ever held accountable, because the president will not do as much for himself. He admits no mistakes because he is convinced that he has made none. The terrorist attacks themselves, for which Tenet should have been sacked, are no one's fault because they cannot be the president's fault. He was warned. Condi Rice was put on notice. But, still, who could have known?

To make these awards in the face of failure -- the mounting American death toll, the awful suffering of the Iraqis, the looming possibility of civil war, the nose-thumbing of the still-at-large Osama bin Laden and the madness of making war for a nonexistent reason -- has the creepy feel of the old communist states, where incompetents wore medals and harsh facts were denied. For this reason Bernie Kerik -- three months in Iraq building a police force as good as rhetoric can make it -- seemed as likely and appropriate a recipient of a presidential medal as any of the others.

Maybe next year.

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For Some, the Race Remains Far From Over

Los Angeles Times
For Some, the Race Remains Far From Over

Sun Dec 12, 7:55 AM ET

By Sam Howe Verhovek Times Staff Writer

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Clifford Arnebeck won't let it go. He can't let it go. Not, he says, while America refuses to recognize that John F. Kerry was elected president Nov. 2.

Arnebeck, a Democratic lawyer here and co-chairman of a self-styled national populist alliance, is petitioning the state's highest court to throw out official results that favor President Bush and instead hand Ohio's 20 electoral votes — and thus the White House — to Kerry. Or, at least, order a revote.

The bid appears quixotic, to put it politely, as Bush has been officially declared the winner by 119,000 votes and Arnebeck is arguing before a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in Ohio. Nor is the Massachusetts senator helping him out, said Arnebeck.

"I can't for the life of me understand why Kerry isn't fighting harder for this. Maybe it's some secret Skull and Bones tradition, where you're not supposed to show up the other guy," Arnebeck said, referring to the Yale secret society of which Bush and Kerry were both members.

Most of the country may have moved on, and electoral college slates are due to meet in all 50 states Monday to cast formal votes that will give Bush a 286-252 winning edge and a second term.

Even many who are disturbed by aspects of the recent election — such as long lines at polling places or touch-screen voting machines with no paper trail for audits — say they want future improvements but nonetheless believe Bush won a fair battle.

But for Arnebeck and thousands of others, this contest is far from over.

They feed each other's postelection rage over the Internet, swapping reports about voter suppression and possible computer hacking or other electronic manipulation of the results.

Protests continue to be staged, including a "rally to change the tally" in San Francisco and black-armband demonstrations in Denver and Boston this weekend against what organizers call the "media blackout of election fraud." But they are especially focused on Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes proved crucial.

"I would like to welcome you to Ukraine," said Susan Truitt, a speaker last weekend at a rally outside the Ohio statehouse, where 400 showed up to demand an inquiry into fraud allegations. She was referring to the nation about to hold a new presidential election after protests that the first one was rigged.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also appeared at the rally, cited a recurring grievance of the groups who questioned the legitimacy of Bush's 2004 victory. Why is it, Jackson asked, that exit polls seemed to point toward a Kerry victory that day?

Rather than analyzing faults in the exit polls, Jackson and others say, why aren't the media and public officials digging more aggressively for chicanery in the tabulations?

"We can live with winning and losing," Jackson recently told a Baptist congregation in Columbus. "We cannot live with fraud and stealing."

Officials here are not taking kindly to the charges.

"Jackson owes every election official in Ohio an apology," said Keith Cunningham, vice president of the Ohio Assn. of Election Officials. "His accusations are outrageous, preposterous and baseless."

Because every Ohio county election board has two Democrats and two Republicans, officials here argue, manipulation of voting would require a massive conspiracy.

But that is just what Jackson and various protest groups allege, and they point to what they say are several suspicious occurrences that demand further investigation:

• In several counties, a Democratic candidate for state chief justice got more votes than Kerry, even though she lost statewide by a wider margin than did Kerry, and the overall total of votes cast in her race was 4.4 million, well below the 5.6 million cast in the presidential race.

• A "computer glitch," as local officials called it, recorded an extra 3,893 votes for Bush in suburban Columbus, in a precinct with only 638 votes cast. Officials say they caught the glitch and fixed it, showing that the system works; but protesters say they wonder where else such discrepancies may have gone undetected.

• Long lines forced many Ohioans to wait hours to vote and may have deterred some from voting at all. They were reported to be especially long in urban Democratic areas and in some college towns. Some voters want to know why. At Kenyon College in rural Knox County, a machine malfunction caused some students to wait as long as 10 hours to vote, college officials say, the last emerging at 4 a.m.

Another controversy, which surfaced last year and is a continuing target of outrage, involved the chief executive of Ohio-based Diebold Inc., a major player in the electronic touch-screen voting industry. In an August 2003 invitation to a Bush fundraising event, he wrote that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

The official, Walden O'Dell, later described himself to the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "a real novice on the political side," and he amended company policy to prohibit himself and other top officials from making or raising political contributions or engaging in any other political activity other than voting.

Just how many people are actively protesting the election is difficult to gauge, and interviews on the street suggest that a lot of people, Democrats and Republicans alike, just want to put it behind them.

"I voted for Kerry. I wanted him to win. I thought he would win," said Anne Matthieson, an account assistant at a downtown insurance firm. "But he didn't win."

Still, for those who believe otherwise, there are several websites dedicated to the cause. Several have links that allow a person, at the push of a button, to send a message to hundreds of reporters and public officials, demanding further investigation into voting problems. One accuses the media of "cowardice and complicity" in reporting on election results.

The sites are also raising money, enough to pay for a recount of the Ohio vote (which is formally being undertaken on behalf of the Green and Libertarian party presidential candidates, who are both critical of Ohio voting procedures) and for the legal challenge that Arnebeck, the Columbus lawyer, is spearheading.

State officials say the recount will cost more than the $10-per-precinct fee that the challengers are paying.

Kerry, who may be interested in running again in 2008, is walking a bit of a fine line in the matter, encouraging the recount process but dampening any expectation it will yield a political miracle.

"It's important that every vote be counted," said his spokesman, David Wade. "There's no reason to believe the outcome of the election will change."

A Democrat close to the Kerry campaign, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Kerry had received plenty of "do not make this concession" advice from party members.

"It's not just the Internet conspiracy community," said the Kerry ally. "The every-vote-counts community is very strong inside the Democratic Party, and one does not want to discourage them."

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who also was co-chairman of the state campaign for Bush and a likely gubernatorial candidate in 2006, said he was just as interested as anyone in counting every vote.

"This was an election where you have some glitches but none of these glitches were of a conspiratorial nature, and none of them would overturn or change the election results," Blackwell said Monday, announcing his certification of the results.

Under the certified results, Bush had 2.86 million votes, or about 51% , to Kerry's 2.74 million, or 49%. After all provisional votes were counted, the Bush margin represented a drop of about 17,000 votes from the totals announced just after election day.

Arnebeck, who has made two unsuccessful runs for Congress and was an Ohio coordinator for Ross Perot (news - web sites), is undeterred. If the court orders a full and thorough investigation, he said, Kerry will win. He wishes Kerry would join the fight.

"He and his people are too ready to disbelieve that Republicans could be this bad," Arnebeck said. "They are this bad. Ballot-box stuffing is an old American tradition, and they've just updated it. I'm not surprised that somebody hacked this vote."

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Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio

Yahoo! News
Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio

Wed Dec 15

By Michael Powell and Peter Slevin, Washington Post Staff Writers

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Tanya Thivener's is a tale of two voting precincts in Franklin County. In her city neighborhood, which is vastly Democratic and majority black, the 38-year-old mortgage broker found a line snaking out of the precinct door.

She stood in line for four hours -- one hour in the rain -- and watched dozens of potential voters mutter in disgust and walk away without casting a ballot. Afterward, Thivener hopped in her car and drove to her mother's house, in the vastly Republican and majority white suburb of Harrisburg. How long, she asked, did it take her to vote?

Fifteen minutes, her mother replied.

"It was . . . poor planning," Thivener said. "County officials knew they had this huge increase in registrations, and yet there weren't enough machines in the city. You really hope this wasn't intentional."

Electoral problems prevented many thousands of Ohioans from voting on Nov. 2. In Columbus, bipartisan estimates say that 5,000 to 15,000 frustrated voters turned away without casting ballots. It is unlikely that such "lost" voters would have changed the election result -- Ohio tipped to President Bush (news - web sites) by a 118,000-vote margin and cemented his electoral college majority.

But similar problems occurred across the state and fueled protest marches and demands for a recount. The foul-ups appeared particularly acute in Democratic-leaning districts, according to interviews with voters, poll workers, election observers and election board and party officials, as well as an examination of precinct voting patterns in several cities.

In Cleveland, poorly trained poll workers apparently gave faulty instructions to voters that led to the disqualification of thousands of provisional ballots and misdirected several hundred votes to third-party candidates. In Youngstown, 25 electronic machines transferred an unknown number of votes for Sen. John F. Kerry (news, bio, voting record) (D-Mass.) to the Bush column.

In Columbus, Cincinnati and Toledo, and on college campuses, election officials allocated far too few voting machines to busy precincts, with the result that voters stood on line as long as 10 hours -- many leaving without voting. Some longtime voters discovered their registrations had been purged.

"There isn't enough to prove fraud, but there have been very significant problems in running elections in Ohio this year that demand reform," said Edward B. Foley, who is director of the election law program at the Ohio State University law school and a former Ohio state solicitor. "We clearly ended up disenfranchising people, and I don't want to minimize that."

Franklin County election officials -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats -- say they allocated machines based on past voting patterns and their best estimate of where more were needed. But they acknowledge having too few machines to cope with an additional 102,000 registered voters.

Ohio is not particularly unusual. After the 2000 election debacle, which ended with a 36-day partisan standoff in Florida and an election decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002. The intent was to help states upgrade aging voting machines and ensure that eligible voters are not turned away. To a point, it has had the desired effect.

"Viewed dispassionately, the national elections ran much more smoothly than in 2000," said Charles Stewart III, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a specialist in voting behavior and methodology. Because of improved technology "nationwide, we counted perhaps 1 million votes that we would have lost four years ago."

But much work remains. Congress imposed only the minimal national standards and included too few dollars. Tens of thousands of machines -- including 70 percent of Ohio's machines -- still use punch-card ballots, which have a high error rate. A patchwork quilt of state rules governs voter registration and provisional ballots. (Provisional ballots are given to voters whose names do not appear on registration rolls -- studies show that minorities and poor voters cast a disproportionate number of such ballots.) Ohio recorded 153,000 provisional ballots. But in Georgia, one-third of the election districts did not record a single provisional ballot in 2004.

In Florida, ground zero for 2000's election meltdown, professors and graduate students from the University of California at Berkeley studied this year's voting results, contrasting counties that had electronic voting machines with those that used traditional voting methods. They concluded, based on voting and population trends and other indicators, that irregularities associated with machines in three traditionally Democratic counties in southern Florida may have delivered at least 130,000 excess votes for Bush in a state the president won by about 381,000 votes. The study prompted heated critiques from some polling experts.

Stewart of MIT was skeptical, too. But he ran the numbers and came up with the same result. "You can't break it; I've tried," Stewart said. "There's something funky in the results from the electronic-machine Democratic counties."

Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout, who directed the study, said the problem in Florida probably lies with the technology. (Florida's touch-screen machines lack paper records.) "I've always viewed this as a software problem, not a corruption problem," he said. "We'd never tolerate this level of errors with an ATM. The problem is that we continue to do democracy on the cheap."
A Heated Run-Up

By October, the Bush and Kerry campaigns knew that this midwestern state was a crucial battleground. Each side assembled armies of 3,000 lawyers and paralegals, and unaffiliated organizations poured in thousands more volunteers. Both parties filed lawsuits challenging rules and registrations.

Two decisions proved pivotal.

Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Ohio, decided to strictly interpret a state law governing provisional ballots. He ruled that voters must cast provisional ballots not merely in the county but in the precise precinct where they reside. For cities such as Cleveland and Cincinnati, where officials long accepted provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, the ruling promised to disqualify many voters. "It is a headache to take those ballots, but the alternative is disenfranchisement," said Michael Vu, director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, which includes Cleveland.

Earlier this year, state officials also decided to delay the purchase of touch-screen machines, citing worries about the security of the vote. That left many Ohio counties with too few machines. County boards are split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, and control the type of machines and their distribution. In Cuyahoga County, officials decided to quickly rent hundreds of additional voting machines.

Other counties decided to muddle through. At Kenyon College, a surge of late registrations promised a record vote -- but Knox County officials allocated two machines, just as in past elections. In voter-rich Franklin County, which encompasses the state capital of Columbus, election officials decided to make do with 2,866 machines, even though their analysis showed that the county needed 5,000 machines.

"Does it make any sense to purchase more machines just for one election?" asked Michael R. Hackett, deputy director of the Board of Elections. "I'll give you the answer: no."

On Election Day, more than 5.7 million Ohioans voted, 900,000 more voters than in 2000.

In Toledo, Dayton, Columbus and Akron, and on the campuses at Ohio State and Kenyon, long lines formed on Election Day, and hundreds of voters stood in the rain for hours. In Columbus, Sarah Locke, 54, drove to vote with her daughter and her parents at a church in the predominantly black southeast. It was jammed. Old women leaned heavily on walkers, and some people walked out, complaining that bosses would not excuse their lateness.

"It was really demeaning," Locke said. "I never remembered it being this bad."

Some regular voters filed affidavits stating that their registrations had been expunged. "I'm 52, and I've voted in every single election," Kathy Janoski of Columbus said. "They kept telling me, 'You must be mistaken about your precinct.' I told them this is where I've always voted. I felt like I'd been scrubbed off the rolls."
Aftermath of Nov. 2

After the election, local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry.

Voters in most Democratic wards experienced five-hour waits, and turnout was lower than expected. "I don't know if it's by accident or design, but I counted a dozen people walking away from the line in my precinct in Columbus," said Robert Fitrakis, a professor at Columbus State Community College and a lawyer involved in a legal challenge to certifying the vote.

Franklin County officials say they allocated machines according to instinct and science. But Hackett, the deputy director, acknowledged the need to examine the issue more carefully. "When the dust settles, we'll have to look more closely at this," he said.

In Knox County, some Kenyon College students waited 10 hours to vote. "They had to skip classes and skip work," said Matthew Segal, a 19-year-old student.

In northeastern Ohio, in the fading industrial city of Youngstown, Jeanne White, a veteran voter and manager at the Buckeye Review, an African American newspaper, stepped into the booth, pushed the button for Kerry -- and watched her vote jump to the Bush column. "I saw what happened; I started screaming: 'They're cheating again and they're starting early!' "

It was not her imagination. Twenty-five machines in Youngstown experienced what election officials called "calibration problems." "It happens every election," said Thomas McCabe, deputy director of elections for Mahoning County, which includes Youngstown. "It's something we have to live with, and we can fix it."

As expected, there were more provisional ballots, and officials disqualified about 23 percent. In Hamilton County, which encompasses Cincinnati and its Ohio suburbs, 1,110 provisional ballots got tossed out because people voted in the wrong precinct. In about 40 percent of those cases, voters found the right polling place -- which contained multiple precincts -- but workers directed them to the wrong table.

In Cleveland, officials disqualified about one-third of the provisional ballots. Vu, the election board chief, said that some poll workers may have also mixed up their punch-card styluses -- that would account for why a few overwhelmingly Democratic precincts recorded large numbers of votes for conservative third-party candidates.

Still, state officials saw little to apologize for, particularly in the case of provisional ballots. A recent count of provisional ballots sliced 18,000 votes off Bush's margin in Ohio. "In Washington, D.C., a voter who casts a ballot in the wrong precinct cannot have that ballot counted," said Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for Blackwell. "Yet in Ohio, it was 'voter suppression' and 'voter disenfranchisement.' "

In the days after the election, as voters swapped stories, anger and talk of Republican conspiracies mounted. "A lot of folks who, having put an enormous amount of energy into this campaign and having believed in the righteousness of their cause, can't believe that we lost," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County election board.

Most senior state officials, Republican and Democratic alike, tend to play down the anger. National Democrats -- including the chief counsel for Kerry's campaign in Ohio -- say they expect the recount to confirm Bush's victory.

But that official view contrasts sharply with the bubbling anger heard among rank-and-file Democrats. While some promote conspiratorial theories, most have a straightforward bottom line. "A lot of people left in the four hours I waited," recalled Thivener, the mortgage broker from Columbus. "A lot of them were young black men who were saying over and over: 'We knew this would happen.'

"How," she asked, "is that good for democracy?"

Slevin reported from Cincinnati. Special correspondents Michelle Garcia in New York and Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Ohio recount may not be Fla. redux, but it's on

USA TODAY
Ohio recount may not be Fla. redux, but it's on

Thu Dec 16

The Associated Press

In a scene reminiscent of Florida circa 2000, two teams of Republican and Democratic election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light Wednesday and whispered back and forth as they tried to divine the voters' intent from a few hanging chads.

Observers for the presidential campaigns of Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), President Bush (news - web sites) and Green Party candidate David Cobb kept watch from chairs a few feet away. The scene is being repeated statewide this week in a recount in the state that put Bush over the top in the election last month.

Officially, Bush beat Kerry by 119,000 votes in Ohio, but two minor-party candidates collected $113,600 for a recount that they claim will show serious irregularities. The Kerry campaign is supporting the recount, too, though it has acknowledged it will not change the outcome.

The recounts began this week. At least 35 of Ohio's 88 counties had completed their recounts or were starting Wednesday, according to a survey by the Associated Press. Some of the tallies will not be complete until next week. "It takes a lot of work, a lot of hours," said Kerry campaign observer Jeannette Harrison, 63, a real estate agent. "This is a job that has to be done."

In Cincinnati, the Hamilton County workers grimaced as they examined the ballot holes up close - a scene that recalled the five weeks of recounts in Florida that made the terms "pregnant chad" and "butterfly ballot" famous.

Statewide, about 92,000 ballots cast in last month's presidential election failed to record a vote for president, most of them on punch-card systems.

Hamilton County workers wrote their results on tally sheets as they counted ballots from 30 precincts randomly selected from the county's 1,013 - a total of about 13,000 of 433,000 ballots cast in November in the county.

Under Ohio law, workers must hand-count 3% of ballots. If the results match the certified results exactly, all other ballots can be recounted by machine. If the totals are off, all ballots must be counted by hand, adding days or weeks to the process.

In a separate action, Jesse Jackson and the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy have asked the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider the election results. They accuse the Bush campaign of "high-tech vote stealing."

Jackson said activists noticed Bush generally received more votes in counties that used optical-scan voting machines, raising suspicions that the machines were calibrated to record votes for the president.

The activists also claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting machines in Democratic-leaning precincts, organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling place and confusion over the counting of provisional ballots.

If the court decides to hear the challenge, it can declare a new winner or throw out the results. However, Ohio cast its 20 electoral votes for Bush on Monday.

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Hanging Chads Make Reappearance in Ohio

Yahoo! News

Hanging Chads Make Reappearance in Ohio

Thu Dec 16

By JOHN NOLAN, Associated Press Writer

CINCINNATI - In a scene reminiscent of Florida circa 2000, two teams of Republican and Democratic election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light Wednesday and whispered back and forth as they tried to divine the voters' intent from a few hanging chads.

Observers for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, President Bush and Green Party candidate David Cobb kept watch from chairs a few feet away.

The scene is being repeated statewide this week in a recount in the state that put Bush over the top in the election last month.

Officially, Bush beat Kerry by 119,000 votes in Ohio, but two third-party candidates collected the required 113,600 for a recount they claim will show serious irregularities. The Kerry campaign is supporting the recount, though it has acknowledged it will not change the outcome.

The recounts began this week. At least 35 of Ohio's 88 counties had completed their recounts or were starting Wednesday, according to a survey by The Associated Press. Some of the tallies will not be complete until next week.

"It takes a lot of work, a lot of hours," said Kerry campaign observer Jeannette Harrison, 63, a real estate agent. "This is a job that has to be done."

In Cincinnati, the Hamilton County workers grimaced in concentration as they examined the ballot holes up close — a scene that called to mind the five weeks of recounts in Florida that made the terms "pregnant chad" and "butterfly ballot" famous.

Statewide, about 92,000 ballots cast in last month's presidential election failed to record a vote for president, most of them on punch-card systems.

Hamilton County workers wrote their results on tally sheets as they counted ballots from 30 precincts randomly selected from the county's 1,013 — a total of about 13,000 of 433,000 ballots cast in November in the county.

Under Ohio law, workers must hand-count 3 percent of ballots. If the results match the certified results exactly, all other ballots can be recounted by machine. If the totals are off, all ballots must be counted by hand, adding days or weeks to the process.

Also Wednesday, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee (news - web sites), urged the FBI to investigate possible election tampering in Hocking County involving an employee of TRIAD Governmental Systems Inc., the company that wrote the voting software used in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.

According to a sworn statement from Sherole Eaton, the county's deputy director of elections, a TRIAD representative told her on Friday he wanted to inspect the county's tabulating machine. She said the employee then told her that "the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone."

"He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information to input into our computer," Eaton said.

Conyers said similar TRIAD visits have been reported in other Ohio counties.

Brett Rapp, president of Xenia, Ohio-based TRIAD, said it's standard procedure to prepare the machines for a recount so they only tally the presidential race. He said company representatives have worked on computers in every county that uses TRIAD software.

The only difference in Hocking was that when the TRIAD employee arrived, the computer's hard drive had to be repaired, he said. No vote tabulations were lost, he said.

"He had to fix the computer in order to continue the recount process," Rapp said, adding that he welcomes an investigation because his employees did nothing wrong.

In a separate action, a federal judge in Akron on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging the punch-card voting system is error-prone and ballots are more likely to go uncounted than votes cast in other ways.

The ACLU also claimed Ohio violated the voting rights of blacks, a large number of whom live in punch-card counties.

However, U.S. District Judge David D. Dowd Jr. disagreed, saying, "No one is denied the opportunity to cast a valid vote because of their race." The Rev. Jesse Jackson (news - web sites) and the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy are backing a request on behalf of 40 voters asking the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider the election results, accusing the Bush campaign of "high-tech vote stealing."

Jackson said activists noticed Bush generally received more votes in counties that use optical-scan voting machines, raising suspicions that the machines were calibrated to record votes for the president.

The activists also claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting machines in Democratic-leaning precincts and organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling place.
___

Associated Press Writer Malia Rulon contributed to this report from Washington.

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Zig Zag Zany Zell Miller to Honor Swift Boat Liars' Group

Yahoo! News
AP
Miller to Honor Swift Boat Vets' Group

Thu Dec 16

By JEFFREY McMURRAY, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - For one night only, it'll be spitballs and Swift Boats together on the same stage — a who's who of Sen. John Kerry bashing.

The American Conservative Union on Thursday announced it has tapped Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., to present the "Courage Under Fire" award to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth at the Conservative Political Action Conference's Feb. 18 banquet.

Miller and the group of Vietnam veterans were behind perhaps the campaign's two fiercest and most memorable attacks on Kerry's unsuccessful presidential bid.

Miller, who is retiring next month, scorched Kerry in a Republican National Convention keynote address in which he suggested the four-term Massachusetts Democrat had voted to cut so many weapons systems, it appeared he wanted to send the military to war with only spitballs.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ran ads after the Democratic convention questioning whether Kerry was in fact the decorated Vietnam War veteran that he claimed to be.

"The swift boat veterans performed an invaluable service to America," Miller said in a statement. "These veterans took a lot of undeserved criticism for daring to speak the truth."

Official military records and even statements from Swift Boat veterans in Navy documents raised questions about their largely unsubstantiated claims, but the political damage had been done. At a post-election forum Wednesday in Boston, Mary Beth Cahill, Kerry's campaign manager, said she regretted underestimating the impact of the Swift Boat ads.

Roy Hoffmann, the retired Navy rear admiral who founded the Swift Boat group, said he didn't know much about Miller but was pleased with the honor. The real goal, he said, was to ensure that Kerry didn't become commander in chief.

"We achieved our goal," Hoffmann said. "That was our primary concern, and we are pleased someone recognized the effort — or at least the impact — we had on the election."

Richard Lessner, executive director of the American Conservative Union, said Miller had spoken at a previous banquet and "lit up the crowd."

Democrats shrugged off the choices of both honorees and presenter.

"It seems fitting that a Republican in Democratic clothing is recognizing the work of Republican agents, namely the smears that the Swift Boat veterans launched against John Kerry," said Jano Cabrera, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

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Economists question White House summit's assessment

Chicago Tribune
Thursday, December 16, 2004

Economists question White House summit's assessment

By Mark Silva

WASHINGTON — Economists assembled by the White House for a high-profile summit yesterday maintained forcefully that the U.S. economy is robust and growing. But many experts outside the Bush administration's circle of advisers and allies insist the president is overlooking warning signs that could affect the economy's long-term health.

President Bush called the two-day White House Conference on the Economy to promote his second-term agenda: Simplifying the tax code, limiting the cost of lawsuits and meeting long-term costs of Social Security.

But some outside economists worry that the summit is glossing over more ominous challenges, including a record federal-budget deficit, a record trade imbalance with other nations and the declining value of the dollar abroad.

"The economy now is in very good shape," said Martin Feldstein, a Harvard professor of economics and former adviser to President Reagan. Feldstein opened the White House conference yesterday with a drumbeat of positive news: more than 2 million jobs created since last year, business investment growing and personal income rising.

The meeting yesterday and today is Bush's second major economic summit, reminiscent of events that President Clinton held. This one has been fashioned as a unanimous chorus of support for the president's programs.

Yet experts outside the parley at the Ronald Reagan Building warn that the administration is not focusing on such problems as the $55.5 billion trade deficit the government reported this week for October, the nearly $2 billion a day the nation is borrowing abroad or the dollar's declining value.

"To me, this is not only an economic issue but also a moral issue, with very long-term implications," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Wells Fargo. "The dollar is already depreciating, and there is a possibility of a plunge in the value of the dollar, which will benefit no one. We are playing with fire to some extent."

The dollar has lost 30 percent of its value in comparison with the euro in the past three years. While that helps U.S. manufacturers sell products abroad, further decline could drive foreign investors away from the Treasury bills issued to finance the nation's debt.

The White House says it is confronting long-term economic trouble not only at this conference, but also in the legislative agenda it will advance in 2005.

"The president has put particular attention on the plight of the small-business person," said White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, pointing to simplification of the tax code as a move that would spur business growth.

Foremost among Bush's goals is overhauling Social Security, which the White House will ask Congress to address next year.

Making Social Security financially solvent and cutting the federal deficit will strengthen the economy, Bush said in a meeting yesterday with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who expressed concern about the American economy and the dollar.

"The policy of my government is a strong-dollar policy," Bush said. But the president, who has refrained from taking action to prop up the dollar, added, "We believe the markets should make the decisions [about] the relationship between the dollar and the euro."

While protecting the benefits of Americans at or near retirement, the White House hopes to offer younger workers private retirement investments as a partial alternative to the current Social Security. That would be part of a plan to try to offset some of the nearly $11 trillion in long-term debt in the Social Security system — a system the administration calls financially "unsustainable" in its current form.

"The math is undeniable," Bartlett said in a breakfast with reporters. "We cannot meet our obligations for future generations."

The president insists that Social Security can be made financially sound without raising payroll taxes. But some in Congress warn that this will lead to more borrowing, even as the president pledges to cut the record $412 billion budget deficit in half by 2009.

The government has promised baby boomers and their children more than it can deliver in Social Security, Medicare and other benefits critical for an aging nation, experts say. While the White House is working on this problem, and already has expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs, the agenda of its economic conference seems to demonstrate a more immediate concern for cutting taxes, curtailing business regulation and controlling the cost of lawsuits.

Some experts say Social Security cannot be made solvent without curtailing benefits, such as increasing the age for retirement benefits to 75 over time.

"We have to face seniors and future seniors and let them know we can't keep these commitments," Art Rolnick, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said in an interview. "The difficult part is, once you promise something, it's difficult to take it away."

The president briefly attended the conference yesterday to tout his goal of limiting the money people can win from lawsuits.

"The cost of frivolous lawsuits in some cases make it prohibitively expensive for a small business to stay in business or for a doctor to practice medicine," said Bush.

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Conyers "prepared" to contest Ohio Electoral Vote

msnbc.com

December 15, 2004 | 11:07 p.m. ET

Conyers "prepared" to contest Ohio Electoral Vote
Keith Olbermann

NEW YORK - The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee told us tonight on Countdown that he and others in Congress are considering formally challenging the slate of electors who cast Ohio’s votes, when those votes are opened and counted before a joint session of Congress on January 6th.

“We’re prepared to do that,” Conyers said. “And we understand the law as well as you.” After the on-air interview ended, the Michigan representative added that he and his colleagues had not yet decided whether or not to take the extraordinary constitutional step, and he had not sought the support of a Senator who would have to co-sign the challenge.

The constitution provides the challenge process for the eventuality that a given state’s popular vote is determined to have been compromised after that state has certified the vote, and its members of the Electoral College have cast their ballots for a presidential candidate. Such a challenge needs to be in written form, signed by one member of the Senate, and one member of the House. Upon its presentation, the joint vote-counting session would be adjourned, and the Senate and House separately vote, by simple majority, whether to accept the challenge, or let that state’s electoral votes stand as cast.

Conyers also rebuffed criticism that his “voting forums” in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio, had included formal participation only by Democratic congressmen and politicians. “The fact that Republicans didn’t join us isn’t our problem, it’s their fault.” Republican Congressman Bob Ney of Ohio last week announced plans to conduct an investigation into the 2004 vote under his auspices as Chairman of the House Administration Committee.

Conyers said he had not yet received a reply to his request to the Cincinnati field office of the FBI and the office of the Hocking County, Ohio, Prosecutor, to begin an investigation into the allegations that a vote-tabulating machine there was manipulated there last Friday, contrary to the statewide instructions of Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell that no ballots or vote-counting equipment be inspected except in the presence of bi-partisan observers of that state’s recount.

He said he “didn’t know” if the explanation offered by the president of Triad, the manufacturer of the tabulator, that his employee merely conducted maintenance on the machine, was valid. But he did note that the source of the allegations, Hocking County Deputy Director of Elections Sherole Eaton, has “given a sworn affidavit. The president of the company hasn’t.”

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Patriots March For Fair Elections

From votecobb.com

Dec. 12, 2004: Rally against voter suppression at Minnesota State Capitol (St. Paul). It was windy and bitter cold, with temperatures hovering at about zero degress all day. These are patriots!






Dec. 12, 2004: Protesters in Sacramento, California

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New Mexico: Presidential Recount Request Headed To Court

abqjournal.com
December 15, 2004

Presidential Recount Request Headed To Court

By Deborah Baker
The Associated Press

SANTA FE — A judge on Wednesday upheld the state canvassing board's decision to require more than $1 million up front before a recount of presidential votes in New Mexico could begin.
State District Judge Carol Vigil made the ruling after a hearing.
A lawyer for the Green and Libertarian presidential nominees who requested the recount said they would take their fight to the state Supreme Court unless some kind of compromise could be worked out with the board.
"I think the judge's decision does not comply with the law," Lowell Finley said.
He had argued that the board went beyond the law Tuesday when it voted to require the payment of $1.4 million by 10 a.m. Thursday.
Finley said the Greens and Libertarians are "fully prepared" to pay for the recount, but that the law requires a deposit of no more than the $114,400 they already have deposited.
Vigil said the $114,400 "has got your foot in the door," but that the board was within its rights to require more up front.
Finley said he would discuss with board lawyers the possibility of narrowing the recount request to review only a portion of the state's voting machines used in the Nov. 2 general election.
Secretary of State Rebecca Vigil-Giron estimated the cost of the statewide recount would be more than $1.1 million.
That includes $765,130 to pay more than 8,000 poll workers, $241,620 for sheriffs to deliver summonses to the workers, and $108,670 for the per-precinct and per-machine costs required by law, she said.
But when the board voted, it agreed on a $1.4 million figure. A lawyer for the board said later that was intended to include mileage costs which could not yet be calculated.
Finley contended that the $1.4 million figure was "made up out of thin air."
Under state law, a candidate who requests a recount must pay for it if the winner of the race doesn't change.
Canvassing board members — the governor, the secretary of state and the chief justice of the state Supreme Court — said they didn't want the state to get stuck with the cost.
"I don't want to have just $114,000 from an out-of-state group that we may never be able to get the sheriff's posse after . . . for the remainder of the dollars," Vigil-Giron said in an interview Tuesday.
During the board's Tuesday evening meeting, Vigil-Giron first made a motion that the recount request be denied, which was unanimously approved. Minutes later, citing the Greens' and Libertarians' "good faith effort to send a deposit," she backtracked and proposed to order the recount if the candidates provide the additional money. That passed unanimously.
"I felt that they needed to be given an opportunity to come up with that money," Vigil-Giron said later.
Green presidential candidate David Cobb and Libertarian nominee Michael Badnarik say a recount in New Mexico — where President Bush defeated John Kerry by nearly 6,000 votes — could help identify problems with various types of voting machines.
The board on Tuesday also gave the go-ahead for a recount of paper ballots in 11 precincts in an east-side state Senate district where Democratic challenger Bob Frost lost by just 36 votes to Sen. Clint Harden, R-Clovis.
The recount, requested by Frost for selected precincts in Colfax, Taos and Union counties, is to begin Thursday.

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Ohio Recount Resembles Florida in 2000

news.yahoo.com

Ohio Recount Resembles Florida in 2000

By JOHN NOLAN, Associated Press Writer

CINCINNATI - In a scene reminiscent of Florida circa 2000, two teams of Republican and Democratic election workers held punch-card ballots up to the light Wednesday and whispered back and forth as they tried to divine the voters' intent from a few hanging chads.

Observers for the presidential campaigns of John Kerry, President Bush (news - web sites) and Green Party candidate David Cobb kept watch from chairs a few feet away.

The scene is being repeated statewide this week in a recount in the state that put Bush over the top in the election last month.

Officially, Bush beat Kerry by 119,000 votes in Ohio, but two third-party candidates collected the required $113,600 for a recount they claim will show serious irregularities. The Kerry campaign is supporting the recount, though it has acknowledged it will not change the outcome.

The recounts began this week. At least 35 of Ohio's 88 counties had completed their recounts or were starting Wednesday, according to a survey by The Associated Press. Some of the tallies will not be complete until next week.

"It takes a lot of work, a lot of hours," said Kerry campaign observer Jeannette Harrison, 63, a real estate agent. "This is a job that has to be done."

In Cincinnati, the Hamilton County workers grimaced in concentration as they examined the ballot holes up close — a scene that called to mind the five weeks of recounts in Florida that made the terms "pregnant chad" and "butterfly ballot" famous.

Statewide, about 92,000 ballots cast in last month's presidential election failed to record a vote for president, most of them on punch-card systems.

Hamilton County workers wrote their results on tally sheets as they counted ballots from 30 precincts randomly selected from the county's 1,013 — a total of about 13,000 of 433,000 ballots cast in November in the county.

Under Ohio law, workers must hand-count 3 percent of ballots. If the results match the certified results exactly, all other ballots can be recounted by machine. If the totals are off, all ballots must be counted by hand, adding days or weeks to the process.

Also Wednesday, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, urged the FBI to investigate possible election tampering in Hocking County involving an employee of TRIAD Governmental Systems Inc., the company that wrote the voting software used in 41 of Ohio's 88 counties.

According to a sworn statement from Sherole Eaton, the county's deputy director of elections, a TRIAD representative told her on Friday he wanted to inspect the county's tabulating machine. She said the employee then told her that "the battery in the computer was dead and that the stored information was gone."

"He proceeded to take the computer apart and call his office to get information to input into our computer," Eaton said.

Conyers said similar TRIAD visits have been reported in other Ohio counties.

Brett Rapp, president of TRIAD, told The New York Times that preparing machines for a re-count was standard procedure and said he welcomed any investigation.

In a separate action, a federal judge in Akron on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleging the punch-card voting system is error-prone and ballots are more likely to go uncounted than votes cast in other ways.

The ACLU also claimed Ohio violated the voting rights of blacks, a large number of whom live in punch-card counties.

However, U.S. District Judge David D. Dowd Jr. disagreed, saying, "No one is denied the opportunity to cast a valid vote because of their race."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Massachusetts-based Alliance for Democracy are backing a request on behalf of 40 voters asking the Ohio Supreme Court to reconsider the election results, accusing the Bush campaign of "high-tech vote stealing."

Jackson said activists noticed Bush generally received more votes in counties that use optical-scan voting machines, raising suspicions that the machines were calibrated to record votes for the president.

The activists also claim there were disparities in vote totals for Democrats, too few voting machines in Democratic-leaning precincts and organized campaigns directing voters to the wrong polling place.

Associated Press Writer Malia Rulon contributed to this report from Washington.

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Test Failure Sets Back U.S. Missile Defense Plan

Yahoo! News

Test Failure Sets Back U.S. Missile Defense Plan

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's drive to deploy a multibillion-dollar shield against ballistic missiles was set back on Wednesday by what critics called a stunning failure of its first full flight test in two years.

The abortive $85 million exercise raised fresh questions about the reliability of the first elements of the plan, an heir to former president Ronald Reagan's vision of an space-based missile defense that critics dubbed "Star Wars."

The interceptor missile never left its silo at Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, shutting itself down automatically because of an "anomaly" of unknown origin, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said.

About 16 minutes earlier, a target missile had been fired from Kodiak, Alaska, in what was to have been a fly-by test chiefly designed to gather data on new hardware, software and engagement angles, said Richard Lehner, a spokesman.

For instance, a booster built by Orbital Sciences Corp. was to have been exercised for the first time in the way it would actually be fielded. One of the test's goals was to show it was ready for production.

"Obviously it isn't," said Philip Coyle, who was the Pentagon's chief weapons tester under President Bill Clinton, "and now they also will have to fix the boosters that have been installed in silos in Alaska and Vandenberg" Air Force Base, California.

DOUBTS ABOUT SYSTEM

The Pentagon plans to spend more than $50 billion over the next five years on all aspects of missile defense, aiming to weave in airborne, ship- and space-based assets. The system that failed on Wednesday is know as the ground-based midcourse system, or GMD. By some estimates, the Pentagon has already spent $130 billion on missile defense efforts.

Despite widespread doubts among physicists about the technical readiness of the system, Bush had sought to have a rudimentary capability against North Korean missiles on alert by the end of this month.

"We say to those tyrants who believe they can blackmail America and the free world - you fire, we're going to shoot it down," he said at a campaign stop in Ridley, Pennsylvania, on Aug. 17.

But all eight of the system's intercept tests, the last of which failed in December 2002, have fallen far short of replicating realistic war scenarios, experts inside and outside the government have said. Of the total, five have succeeded in highly scripted conditions, never at night or in severe weather.

Coyle described as wrong-headed any decision to declare the system operational despite the latest failure.

"Premature declaration of operational status could mislead the Congress and U.S. taxpayers that they are being protected by the GMD system, when they are not," he said in an e-mail.

To develop the system, the Missile Defense Agency has planned 20 or 30 more flight intercept tests, each different from the next, before it will be ready for "realistic operational testing," Coyle said.

DELAYED TESTING PROCESS?

"If these 20 or 30 tests each take two years, like the latest test, it could be 50 years before the GMD system will be ready" for deployment, he said. "And this assumes they all succeed. If some fail, as this latest test did, it could take even longer."

Wade Boese, research director of the Arms Control Association, a private Washington-based group that favors reduced spending on the project, said: "The more one thinks about the test, the more incredible it is that it failed."

"The Pentagon had two years essentially to prepare ... and publicly described it in a way to guard against any chance that it could be deemed a failure," he said.

Unlike the botched mission early Wednesday, the last full flight test had as its chief goal to shoot down its target. It misfired on Dec. 11, 2002, when the warhead -- a "kill vehicle" meant to obliterate a mock warhead by slamming into it -- failed to separate from its booster rocket.

Neither the Missile Defense Agency nor the Pentagon responded to questions about the failure's impact on the deployment timetable.

Boeing Co., the Pentagon's prime contractor on the project, referred comment to the Missile Defense Agency.

The Pentagon has already suggested its schedule is slipping.

"I'm not constrained by timing, exactly," Michael Wynne, the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer, said on Dec. 8 in reply to a question about switching the system on. "But we'll see how (the test) goes and then we'll see from there."

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Bush View of Economy at Odds With Forecast

news.yahoo.com

Bush View of Economy at Odds With Forecast

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - An economy with blue skies, happy workers and prosperity for all, just around the corner. That's the sunny picture painted Wednesday at President Bush's economic conference, where nary a discouraging word was uttered and Bush's second-term priorities were resoundingly praised. In reality, Bush will have a hard time getting any of his major proposals through a skeptical Congress.

Bush's plans to overhaul the tax code and Social Security and to limit lawsuit liability awards are generating stiff opposition, even among some groups that supported his earlier economic endeavors.

On the opening day of Bush's choreographed two-day economic conference, moderators and participants alike sang praises to his first-term accomplishments and second-term agenda. His proposals — many still being formulated — were hailed as the remedy for what still needs to be fixed.

Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites): "If we stay on that path, the years ahead will bring even greater progress and prosperity."

Larry Mocha, a Tulsa, Okla., manufacturer of truck air brake systems: "I want to thank the administration for all the positive things you've done for our economy. ... It hasn't always been this good."

Treasury Secretary John Snow: "We are the envy of the world."

Harvard economics professor Martin Feldstein: "I'm pleased to say the economy is now in very good shape."

"It's not exactly `Crossfire,'" joked American University political scientist Alan J. Lichtman.

Lichtman said the administration was clearly using the forum to pitch the president's program, not gather new ideas. "The jury is still out" on how effective the tactic will prove, he said.

The forum kicked off an intense White House public relations effort to win public support. It may take a lot of salesmanship.

Bush's proposal to let younger workers invest some of their Social Security withholdings in the stock market has drawn substantial opposition. Proponents say such a system promises higher long-term returns, allowing the government to spend less. But opponents say it could leave retirees holding the bag in times of prolonged market downturns.

"This is not a recipe for strengthening the system," said Henry J. Aaron, an economic analyst at the Brookings Institution, not among those invited to the forum.

The AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, opposes any diversion of money from the current system into personal accounts. Last week, it told its 35 million members Bush's proposal would "make the problem worse." The AARP supported Bush's legislation last year that created a Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

Bush's still-undefined tax restructuring has drawn fire from powerful interest groups. The National Retail Federation opposes any overhaul that moves in the direction of a national sales tax. Other organizations have pleaded for retaining particular tax breaks. The Tax Relief Coalition, which supported the president's earlier tax cuts, has been noncommittal.

Trial lawyer groups oppose limits on jury verdicts, while deficit hawks are wary of Bush's proposal to make his first-term tax cuts permanent.

None of those groups, nor their concerns, were represented at Bush's forum.

While the economy does appear to be recovering, things are not as bright as participants suggested. Job creation remains anemic, budget and trade deficits are at record highs, and a long-slumping dollar threatens to drive up interest rates.

The only time participants painted a dark picture was when they talked about financial burdens suffered because of large legal judgments or because of estate taxes, echoing Bush's invocation of a "death tax." Bush would permanently eliminate estate taxes and put limits on jury awards in medical malpractice and asbestos lawsuits.

"If we can achieve legal reform in America, it'll make it a better place for people to either start a business and-or find work," Bush said Wednesday, participating in a panel on limiting lawsuits.

"All we're asking for is fairness, Mr. President — just as you've said," said Home Depot Chairman Bob Nardelli, who hosted a $3 million fund-raiser for Bush at his Atlanta home during the campaign.

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