Politics and the C.I.A.

The New York Times
November 18, 2004

Politics and the C.I.A.

When President Bush rushed to appoint Porter Goss, a partisan Florida congressman, as director of central intelligence before the election, the choice raised concerns about how serious Mr. Bush was about fixing one of the central problems with American intelligence: that the president was being told what he wanted to hear to confirm his policy choices, rather than what he needed to know. Now that Mr. Bush has been safely re-elected, Mr. Goss is only heightening those fears.

No one who has read the 9/11 commission's report or the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the prewar intelligence on Iraq could doubt the need to shake things up in the intelligence apparatus. It's also important to allow the head of a major government agency to make changes without undue second-guessing. But what Mr. Goss is doing at the Central Intelligence Agency is starting to seem less like reform and more like a political purge.

Mr. Goss has removed the head of the clandestine operations division and his deputy - both career intelligence officers. The No. 2 C.I.A. official, John McLaughlin, has resigned, along with four other senior people. Others are reported to be thinking about leaving. Many of them feel trampled by Mr. Goss's inner circle of political operatives from the House, where he was chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Now, Douglas Jehl of The Times has obtained a memo, circulated on Monday, in which Mr. Goss appeared to be signaling his displeasure with leaks about intelligence on Iraq during the presidential campaign. He reminded his staff twice that they work for a secret agency and said all dealings with the public and with Congress would be handled by his team.

He dutifully noted that the C.I.A.'s job is to "provide the intelligence as we see it - and let the facts speak to the policymaker." But Mr. Goss added language that has reportedly sent a chill through the intelligence agencies: "I also intend to clarify beyond doubt the rules of the road. We support the administration and its policies in our work. As agency employees we do not identify with, support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies."

Certainly, the C.I.A. should not be taking sides in presidential campaigns. Many of Mr. Bush's supporters claim that high-ranking members of the agency attempted to undermine the president's re-election - if Mr. Goss has evidence of that, he should present it. But it's inappropriate for him to suggest that it's the job of the C.I.A. "to support" a particular administration and its political decisions.

The C.I.A.'s loss of public credibility in recent years has been due, in part, to a perception that the agency saw how much the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq and cooked its conclusions to support that goal. What the country wants, and deserves, is an agency where intelligence operatives feel free to tell the administration that policies are based on wrong or incomplete information. They should be able to blow the whistle on mistakes and wrongdoing to the appropriate bodies in Congress without having to go through Mr. Goss's palace guard.

Lawmakers who oversee intelligence have said they will ask Mr. Goss about these events. We hope that their questioning is aggressive and that they make it clear that what was acceptable politics on Capitol Hill is not acceptable at the C.I.A. - particularly if Mr. Bush plans to compound his mistake in choosing Mr. Goss by elevating him to the new job of national intelligence director when Congress finally gets around to creating that much-needed position.

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Lame Duck Confit

The New York Times
November 18, 2004

Lame Duck Confit

Having let the people's business stew for nearly a year, Congress is back in session this week, pledging to complete what the Republican leadership deemed too politically fraught to handle before the election. With time expiring, the lawmakers must raise the federal debt limit - the Senate approved an $800 billion increase yesterday, and the House is expected to follow suit today. The move will allow the government to borrow up to $8.2 trillion. Congress must also pass nine overdue spending bills totaling $355 billion.

What is happening in the halls of Congress right now is a travesty. Let us count the ways.

For nearly a year, everyone in Washington and in the financial markets worldwide has known about the need to raise the debt limit. Doing so basically requires a one-sentence-long piece of legislation. But debate on that bill was bound to draw attention - and rightly so - to the wildly expanding deficits created by the Bush administration's fiscal and economic policies. So, predictably, Congressional leaders delayed facing up to reality.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary John Snow has been forced to suspend the issuance of United States debt, to postpone indefinitely the announcement of the coming Treasury bill auction and to admit to Congress and the world that he is running out of legal ways to keep America afloat. In other words, with risk and uncertainty emanating from every corner of the global economy, the Congressional leaders' foot-dragging has made them look like fiscal buffoons, courting a loss of lenders' confidence in the government's ability to steward a deeply indebted nation. No one is worried about an American default. But Congress has been playing economic brinksmanship when leadership has been needed - and that's foolish.

That's not the worst of it. The new fiscal year began Oct. 1, but Congress has failed to pass the spending bills needed to pay for about 20 percent of the federal government - virtually everything except defense, homeland security, entitlements like Medicare and interest payments on the national debt. Neither the House nor the Senate was able to stay below the unrealistically low spending caps without resorting to gimmicks, ending up with competing out-of-whack bills that are some $8 billion apart. (The Senate wants more spending than the relatively more government-averse House.)

With no time or willingness to bridge their differences, and little appetite for confronting the mess they have created, the lawmakers now plan to lump all the spending into one huge bill: the dreaded omnibus. The great advantage for the faint of heart is that no one will actually see the actual bill before it's passed. The problem is that it will home in on the unrealistic spending targets with an indiscriminate, across-the-board reduction that ignores the real needs the government is supposed to be addressing. For instance, the Energy Department has predicted a 38 percent increase in the cost of home heating oil this winter, but heating assistance for low-income people will probably be cut to allow for an increase of only 5 percent.

To make really awful matters worse, members are freely larding the bill with nonessential pork even as they ignore essential needs. There are the usual last-minute anti-environmental riders undermining protections for forests and endangered species, but the worst by far is a proposed $2 billion expansion of the lock system on the upper Mississippi River, a project that the National Academy of Sciences has twice reviewed and twice declared a waste of money.

Finally, the cost-cutting aspects of this exercise are a fiscal charade. The spending that Congressional Republicans will go after - known as nondefense, domestic, discretionary spending - is not to blame for the federal budget deficit. Far from being out of control, the growth rate for such spending dropped to a mere 1 percent by 2004, after increasing noticeably in 2002, when surpluses from the Clinton years were thought to still be available. It is highly doubtful that domestic discretionary spending in 2005 will even keep pace with inflation. The real culprits in creating the deficit are the costs of the war and homeland security, and, in particular, the cost of the unnecessary tax cut legislation passed during the Bush presidency, which is 17 times as large as the increases in domestic discretionary spending.

Clamping down on domestic spending won't tame the deficit, but it will harm exactly the kinds of government services Americans support and count on. A backlash will eventually come, either from dissatisfied citizens who care about responsive government or from financial markets that care about fiscal sanity. Or both.

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Clinton Library Reflects Its Subject's Volatile Era

The New York Times
November 18, 2004

Clinton Library Reflects Its Subject's Volatile Era
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Nov. 17 - Like the 42nd presidency itself, the new Clinton library here sprawls across eight years of big ambitions and small details and does not omit, but hardly dwells upon, the sex scandal that led to Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.

The William J. Clinton Presidential Center, to be dedicated on Thursday, is a futuristic glass-paneled rectangle cantilevered over the banks of the Arkansas River, evoking Mr. Clinton's metaphoric "Bridge to the 21st Century." It is a reflection of a man who famously crammed just about everything into his speeches and his presidency and has now crammed them or their facsimiles into this shrine he hopes will shape his legacy.

The displays range from the grandly institutional - including a full-size replica of the Oval Office, a duplicate Cabinet room and a 1993 black armored Cadillac limousine that Mr. Clinton used abroad - to the peculiarly Clintonian, like the sunglasses that the future president wore when he played the saxophone on "The Arsenio Hall Show" in the 1992 campaign. A sprig of ivy that was cut from a vine that grew in Mr. Clinton's actual Oval Office is now a full-fledged plant that graces the mantel in the replica office.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Clinton, who has said he spent a year reading architecture books while in the White House, was steeped in the creation of this monument. The exhibition space, shown on a press tour Wednesday, was inspired by the colonnades and alcoves of the library at Trinity College, Dublin, which captivated Mr. Clinton when he first saw them as a Rhodes scholar. Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the exhibits, called Mr. Clinton "our editor in chief, our curator in chief and even our art director at times." James S. Polshek, the architect, said the president was also "the chief cook and bottle washer."

The grounds of the library's 28-acre park, once a desolate row of abandoned warehouses and railroad tracks, contain a grove of 100 magnolia trees, where Mr. Clinton could be buried if he chooses, and where a chapel could be built. The grounds also will provide an area for picnics and cookouts in honor of two of Mr. Clinton's passions: "He loves to talk over food," said George Hargreaves, the landscape architect.

The library is the biggest of the 11 presidential libraries in the national library system, with two million photographs and 80 million pages of documents, and it is the first to store and exhibit electronic records. They add up to more than 35,686 cubic feet of records. "No one else comes close," said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives, which administers the libraries. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was president for 12 years, accumulated only 8,844 cubic feet worth of materials, she said.

This is also the most expensive of the presidential libraries. It cost $165 million, most of it donated by more than 112,000 people whose names are being etched in bricks in front of the library. The cost of maintaining it will shift on Thursday to the federal government, which spent $42 million last year to keep up the other presidential libraries.

This is also the only one to deal directly, however fleetingly, with a personal scandal. It presents Mr. Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, much as his memoir did, as a personal lapse, and it casts the impeachment that resulted as a symptom of a power struggle with the Republicans in Congress.

The name Monica Lewinsky, who is not further identified, appears twice in the text of a larger exhibit called "The Fight for Power." It also contains a video in which Mr. Clinton says, "I am profoundly sorry for what I did to trigger these events." There is a picture of Susan McDougal, a Clinton friend who went to jail over the Whitewater case, but no picture of Ms. Lewinsky.

Parts of the text, such as "character assassination," "politics of persecution" and "rumors and accusations," are highlighted in yellow. And it asserts: "The impeachment battle was not about the Constitution or rule of law, but was instead about a quest for power that the president's opponents could not win at the ballot box."

A visitor can turn from the "Fight for Power" alcove on the left and find on the right a videotape of Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the first lady, and now the junior senator from New York, as she testified before Congress in 1994 on her health care plan.

That kind of incongruity captures the helter-skelter nature of the Clinton presidency and the feel of the multitiered time-line exhibits. Perhaps Mr. Clinton himself best described this quality in a discussion this summer with Oprah Winfrey. "I'm bombing Osama bin Laden's training camp and sleeping on the couch," he said of his tortured summer vacation in 1998 after admitting to the affair with Ms. Lewinsky. "It was a strange time."

Mr. Appelbaum said Mr. Clinton's aides let him know what they wanted emphasized. "This is the way the president wanted to see his legacy defined," he said.

"We have our perspective on it," said John Podesta, Mr. Clinton's chief of staff in the White House, who accompanied reporters Wednesday on the tour. Referring to Kenneth W. Starr, the federal prosecutor who pursued Mr. Clinton, Mr. Podesta added, "I'm sure that if Mr. Starr does his library, he'll have a different perspective on it."

Skip Rutherford, president of the Willliam J. Clinton Foundation, said the library had also started a collection of books, some positive and some negative, about Mr. Clinton and his presidency; so far, he added, it has 1,000 volumes.

The "bad news" borne by other presidents - the Vietnam War for President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Iran-contra scandal for President Ronald Reagan - was added to their libraries long after they opened, after history could no long honor the impulse for a rosier view. Richard M. Nixon's library, built in 1990, 17 years after his resignation, devotes a full gallery exclusively to Watergate and allows visitors to listen to the famous "smoking gun" tapes. It is not yet officially part of the presidential library system, although it is on track to become the 12th.

After the keys to the Clinton library are handed over to the National Archives on Thursday, the federal government will take control of its message. It is unclear what the federal archivists will do with the impeachment segment, but it is likely that it will evolve over time.

"It's a fine line that the federal government walks when we accept a presidential library," said Ms. Cooper, the archives' spokeswoman. "The luxury of time and the luxury of being able to look back is very different from creating an exhibition for a president who just left office. It's the difference between history and current events."

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Senate Backs Higher Debt

The New York Times
November 18, 2004

Senate Backs Higher Debt
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Faced with the prospect of a government unable to pay its bills, the Senate voted on Wednesday to raise the federal debt limit by $800 billion.

Though an increase in the debt ceiling was never in doubt, Republican leaders in both houses of Congress postponed action on it last month, until after the elections, to deprive Democrats of a chance to accuse them of fiscal irresponsibility.

The bill, if approved by the House in a vote expected on Thursday, would authorize the third big increase in the federal borrowing since President Bush took office in 2001. Federal debt has ballooned by $1.4 trillion over the past four years, to $7.4 trillion, and the new ceiling would allow borrowing to reach $8.2 trillion.

With no end in sight to the huge annual budget deficits, which hit a record of $412 billion this year, lawmakers predicted on Wednesday that the new ceiling would probably have to be raised again in about a year.

Democrats, still stinging from their election defeats, voted against the measure and argued that it should be accompanied by rules that would force Congress to pay for new tax cuts with spending cuts or tax increases elsewhere.

"I don't remember anyone during the elections making a promise to raise the federal debt to $8.1 trillion," Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, said. "What we're doing here is just writing another blank check and saying to this administration, 'Go ahead, continue to run record budget deficits.' "

Administration officials have been pleading for an increase in the debt limit since last August, and the Treasury Department has been tapping into Civil Service retirement accounts since Oct. 14 to avoid breaching the limit.

On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow warned that the administration had "exhausted" all the previously used financial maneuvers. The government can probably keep paying bills until early next month, but the Treasury Department would have to postpone an auction of new Treasury securities scheduled for Monday.

Raising the legal borrowing limit has long been more political theater than substantive decision making, because lawmakers ultimately have no choice in the matter if the government is to stay in operation.

The 52-to-44 vote was almost purely along party lines, with one Republican, Senator John Ensign of Nevada, voting against a higher ceiling.

Two Democrats, Senators John B. Breaux of Louisiana and Zell Miller of Georgia, voted in favor of the measure.

Some Republican lawmakers had hoped to bury the measure in a broader spending bill that would attract less attention and that many Democrats would feel compelled to support. But Senate leaders decided to vote on a stand-alone bill in exchange for a commitment from Democrats to limit the debate.

"We've come to a general agreement to move ahead today," Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, said. "The House literally is waiting for us to act."

In a muted floor debate, Democrats did almost all the talking - all aimed at castigating the administration and its Congressional allies for indulging in "borrow and spend" policies - while Republicans grimly waited for the debate to end and the vote to begin.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, in his first appearance on the floor since losing the presidential election, said the growing debt threatened economic security.

"To pay our bills, America now goes cup in hand to nations like China, Korea, Taiwan and Caribbean banking centers," Mr. Kerry said. "Those issues didn't go away on Nov. 3, no matter what the results."

Administration officials contend that the annual deficits are undesirable but necessary to help stimulate an economic recovery and fight a global war on terrorism.

Mr. Bush has promised to reduce the deficit by half over five years, though the administration is fighting to make its tax cuts permanent and may need more than $70 billion in extra money next year to support military operations in Iraq.

House Republicans said they would schedule a vote on the bill for Thursday evening.

"We'll get it done," John Feehry, a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, said. "We have an obligation to keep the government in operation."

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Official Orders Recount in Washington State Race

The New York Times
November 18, 2004

Official Orders Recount in Washington State Race
By SARAH KERSHAW

SEATTLE, Nov. 17 - Washington's secretary of state said Wednesday that he would order a recount of the extraordinarily close race for governor here, ratcheting up the electoral turmoil that has for weeks roiled the contest for the state's highest office.

The race, between Christine Gregoire, 57, a Democrat who is the state attorney general, and Dino Rossi, 45, a Republican businessman and former state senator, has been surprisingly close for the past two weeks. With all 2.9 million votes counted Wednesday evening, Mr. Rossi was ahead by by 261 votes, triggering an automatic recount.

It was close down to the wire. On Tuesday evening, for example, the two candidates were separated by only 19 votes. Late Wednesday, with almost all of the 2.9 million votes counted, it was 48.87 percent to 48.87 percent, with Ms. Gregoire leading by only 28 votes at one point, and Mr. Rossi leading by 92 at another.

At a televised news conference in Olympia, the state capital, the secretary of state, Sam Reed, could barely contain a laugh when at 4:30 p.m. he announced the latest results and said he would officially order the counties to conduct a machine recount either later Wednesday night or early Thursday.

"We are doing everything we can to move this right along," he said. "The difference right now is 34 votes."

Mr. Reed, whose own election for office in 2000 was forced into a recount, said the closeness of this contest was highly unusual, even in a state where several races have prompted recounts. He said he expected a machine recount to be completed by next Wednesday.

Under state law, a winner must be declared by Dec. 2.

The candidates, who have both already begun assembling transition teams, held separate news conferences Wednesday night, Mr. Rossi at his campaign headquarters in Bellevue, east of Seattle, and Ms. Gregoire in downtown Seattle.

Mr. Rossi, surrounded by cheering supporters and family members, smiled broadly and said: "Well, it's a good night, it's definitely a good night. I just want to say that making history isn't easy, and it certainly isn't timely either."

He was upbeat but cautious.

"I'm on the right side of this first count," he said, "which is good."

Ms. Gregoire speaking to her own cheering supporters, said, "Some would say this in an election night without end."

Citing the closeness of the race and the constantly changing figures, she said: "We know how quickly things can change. This race is far from over and we're in it for the long haul."

There have been six other recounts in statewide elections here since 1968, and in 2000 a close election forced a recount in the United States Senate race between Maria Cantwell, the Democrat, and Slade Gorton, the Republican. Ms. Cantwell was declared the winner by 2,229 votes 24 days after the election.

None were so close that they went to a hand count and none ultimately changed the outcome of the initial results, elections and party officials say. But this one seems much harder to predict.

Washington state law requires a recount if the difference between the candidates is fewer than 2,000 votes and less than half of one percentage point. A hand recount is required if the margin is 150 or fewer votes.

A large number of the state's voters cast absentee ballots. Counting often continues well beyond Election Day because Washington allows voters to postmark their ballots as late as midnight on Election Day.

The recount was an extraordinary development given that Ms. Gregoire had long been expected to win comfortably, until the final days of the campaign when her opponent surged ahead. And Washingtonians, who have typically voted for Democrats for president, including Senator John Kerry by a wide margin, have not elected a Republican governor since 1984.

Democrats and Republicans alike said the virtual tie was itself not surprising. "This is the true nature of Washington State," said Chris Vance, the state Republican Party chairman, citing previous recounts. "This is the natural state of affairs."

The daily vote tallies inspired frenzied news reports and headlines in the local newspapers, like one Wednesday in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer that said "And our governor is. ..."

The last few days featured legal wrangling between the two parties, with Republicans challenging the validity of provisional ballots in heavily Democratic King County, which includes Seattle, and trying to block Democrats from access to the names on 929 provisional ballots. Provisional ballots include those cast by a voter who accidentally votes at the wrong polling place or whose name was not listed on the election roster.

A King County Superior Court judge sided with the Democrats, allowing the release of the names and saying the county must count the ballots the Republicans had challenged. In a ruling issued Tuesday, the judge, Dean S. Lum, wrote, "We have arrived at the moment which all reasonable Washingtonians have dreaded for four years: the moment when the court is asked to micromanage an election."

Brian Alexander contributed reporting for this article from Bellevue, and Eli Sanders from Seattle.

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DISNEY CONTINUES TO OPERATE HARD CORE RIGHT-WING RADIO STATIONS FROM COAST TO COAST

Here is an interesting article I just stumbled on that was originally published back in May (from moderateindependent.com):

WHILE DISNEY CLAIMS IT IS REFUSING TO DISTRIBUTE THE MOORE FILM BECAUSE IT IS TOO PARTISAN, DISNEY CONTINUES TO OPERATE HARD CORE RIGHT-WING RADIO STATIONS FROM COAST TO COAST

Purely Partisan Hosts Larry Elder, Al Rantel, And Others Make Up The Lineup On Disney-Owned Right-Wing Radio Stations Like KABC 790 In Los Angeles

by Ben F. Terton

MAY 5, 2004 – This will be a very short article and to the point.

Disney is saying today it will not distribute Michael Moore’s new documentary Fahrenheit 911 because it is politically partisan and Disney doesn’t want to risk offending a group of its audience by taking sides.


Well, turn on KABC 790 AM if you are in Los Angeles, or WABC talk radio in New York, or one of several Disney-owned radio stations around the nation and tell me what you find. Yes, that’s right: all right-wing talk all the time.

Not only partisan, extremely partisan. Even more, highly derisive of anyone who is not a Bush Republican. Insults. Name calling. Not to mention lies and distortions, hateful partisan attacks, and dishonest smears against Democrats and liberals all day every day.

I don't need to go on and on about this point. Quite simply, call up Disney and let them know we know they are liars, and that you won't stand for them pushing the Bush side while silencing the other side.

You can reach them at: Thomas Staggs
Chief Financial Officer
The Walt Disney Company
Phone: (818) 560-1000

If you own Disney stock, tell them you won't stand for them using your money to push for the Bush side while censoring the other side. Call:

Wendy Webb, Investor Relations
The Walt Disney Company
Phone: (818) 560-5758

And then write your favorite media people. Start with Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post just for kicks:

kurtzh@washpost.com

Write to the LA Times, Disney's hometown newspaper where one of their all right-wing all the time radio stations operates and tell them how dare Disney claim they are only trying to avoid partisanship when they operate the likes of 790 AM.

letters@latimes.com

And then write your favorite papers and sites. We have the world's attention about Disney finally, and they would hate the bad publicity.

Remember, these are the people that hired Rush Limbaugh for the ESPN station they own, but then pulled him off once the people got mad.

Hit the Mickey rat and hit it hard.

Thank you for your attention.

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Voters Recount Irregularities

From Channel 10 News in Central Ohio

Franklin County
Voters Recount Irregularities

As thousands of provisional ballots will start to be counted Tuesday, more people are coming forward with stories about voting irregularities during the November 2 election.

Dozens of people crowded into a hearing room at the Franklin County courthouse Monday night.

It was the second public hearing since Saturday, and there was a panel made up of voting rights groups listens to every word.

Voters and poll workers told story after story of voters being disenfranchised.

"Finally, I was offered a provisional ballot after being told to go home three times," one voter says.

Another says, "And we saw all day, well into the night, extremely long lines, two and a half hours were the norm."

"We had three voting machines in our precinct. In the past, we've always had five or six voting machines," says one.

A court reporter was there and the hearing was broadcast on a local radio station. Organizers plan to give copies of everything to Secretary of State Ken Blackwell.

As for counting those provisional ballots, there is no word on how long it will take to get the final tally.

Whatever numbers add up to, there will be plenty of interest both here in Ohio and around the country.

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Secwetawy of State

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Moving Target

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Shrunk the Secretary

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Unfiltered update re: Counting the Votes

November 17, 2004
UnfilteredRadio.com

TALKING POINT:

Ohio, the mother of all battleground states, will be recounted…

No thanks to the Democratic Party, enough money has been raised to fund a recount of the entire state.

No thanks to the media, the recount will occur under the radar screen without a peep from the networks.

We can thank the third parties -- the Greens and the Libertarians -- and regular old individual concerned citizens, who raised the one hundred and thirteen thousand dollars needed to start the recount. More than that was raised online in just four days, mostly in contributions of less than fifty bucks.

And more money is needed for recount monitors on the ground in Ohio. To make a donation.. check our HELPAMERICARECOUNT.ORG.

For updates on Ohio’s recount.. which you probably won’t get on the nightly news, go to PFAW.org.

DISCUSSION POINTS:

In the eleven Ohio counties that have finished checking the provisional ballots, 81% have turned out to be valid.

In New Hampshire, Nader has requested a recount in the 11 districts that used Diebold’s optical scan machines. The recount starts Thursday.

Washington still doesn’t have a governor. Republican Dino Rossi is leading Democrat Christine Gregoire by nineteen votes. Six-thousand votes remain to be counted. A recount is likely.

Right-wing media is calling MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann a “voice of paranoia.” Olbermann is the only network host who insisted on covering the recount efforts.

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House Republicans Adopt Change That Would Benefit DeLay

The New York Times
November 17, 2004

House Republicans Adopt Change That Would Benefit DeLay

By CARL HULSE
and DAVID E. ROSENBAUM

WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Fresh from election gains earlier this month, House Republicans today approved a change in party rules to prevent their majority leader, Tom DeLay, from having to step down from his leadership position should he be indicted in an investigation in Texas.

After a debate lasting two and a half hours, the Republicans voted for a new procedure under which the House party leaders would have 30 days to deliberate if one of their colleagues were indicted on a felony charge. At the end of the 30 days, the leaders would decide whether to ask the person under indictment to step aside at least temporarily.

The new rule supplants one that required a leadership member facing a felony indictment to step aside immediately.

The change, proposed by Representative Henry Bonilla of Texas, was approved this afternoon in a voice vote, with only a handful of dissenters. One of them, Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, called the change "a mistake."Republicans adopted the old rule in the 1990's, when they were in the minority and were trying to put the focus on investigations of prominent Democrats. They say a rule change is justified because the investigation involving Mr. DeLay, who was re-elected majority leader on Tuesday, is politically inspired.

The Republicans say they want to eliminate the chance for a prosecutor to be able to force Mr. DeLay from his post by obtaining an indictment.

"Congressman Bonilla's rule change is designed to prevent political manipulation of the legislative process," Taryn Fritz Walpole, a spokeswoman for the lawmaker, said.

Mr. DeLay's office said he was not taking a stand on the initiative, which his fellow Republicans discussed in a party conference.

"The majority leader believes members of the conference should come to their own conclusions on this issue and that the conference should work its will without his exerting undue influence one way or the other," his communications director, Stuart Roy, said.

House Democrats said on Tuesday that the impending change reflected the opposition's view on ethical behavior.

"If Republicans believe that an indicted member should be allowed to hold a top leadership position in the House of Representatives, their arrogance is astonishing," the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi of California, said in a statement.

Mr. DeLay received back-to-back admonishments by the House Ethics Committee in the weeks before the election, angering some House allies who said the findings were political even though the panel was bipartisan. As the architect of disputed redistricting in Texas that toppled five Democratic incumbents, Mr. DeLay was instrumental in House Republicans' gaining a handful of seats on Nov. 2.

The investigation in Austin has resulted in the indictments of three allies of Mr. DeLay and several companies accused of illegally using corporate campaign contributions to help Republicans win state legislative seats, a move that cleared the way for redistricting.

As House Republicans dealt with that question, Senate Democrats officially chose new leadership to steer them through the more heavily Republican Congress.

And a veteran Senate Republican battled to save his chairmanship in a first test of new conservative power.

As a small group of anti-abortion demonstrators prayed and protested outside the Dirksen Senate Office building, the longtime senator, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, met privately with his colleagues trying to persuade them to allow him to become chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

After one meeting, the current chairman, Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a supporter of Mr. Specter, said: "Senator Specter handled himself very well. I expect him to be the next chairman. I think it will be resolved satisfactorily."

Mr. Hatch cannot keep his chairmanship because Senate Republicans have put term limits on the position.

Mr. Specter, who was re-elected on Nov. 2, has been under fire because of his statement at a news conference after the election that judicial nominees who opposed legal abortions would have trouble winning Senate confirmation.

One Republican on the Judiciary Committee who has a special grievance against Mr. Specter, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, said he had not made up his mind whether to back the Pennsylvanian. In 1985, Mr. Sessions was nominated to a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan, and Mr. Specter opposed the nomination.

Leaders of conservative groups who have been clamoring for the Senate leadership to block Mr. Specter said they would continue their campaign against him until the formal selection of the chairman in January. They added that their differences with Mr. Specter extended well beyond abortion to opposition to same-sex marriage and changes in the legal system, school vouchers and tax cuts.

"Why would we want someone on board who does not share the president's judicial philosophy or his own party's?" asked Patrick Mahoney, the director of the Christian Defense Coalition and a protest organizer.

As that drama was playing out, Senate Democrats also met in private and officially selected Harry Reid of Nevada as their leader, replacing Tom Daschle after he lost his quest for re-election.

At a news conference, Mr. Reid joined his new leadership colleagues, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois as whip and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan as caucus secretary, and said he was willing to work with Republicans and their enlarged majority. but would not shy from confrontation.

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Oh Brother, Ohio, and O'Reilly

Oh Brother, Ohio, and O'Reilly

by Keith Olbermann
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/
November 16, 2004

SECURE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION— Keep your aluminum foil hats at the ready.

The purported linking of failed Florida congressional candidate Jeff Fisher and Ralph Nader, trumpeted on Fisher’s website, is news to Nader’s spokesman Kevin Zeese.

That’s particularly troublesome for Mr. Fisher because it is to Zeese that the connection is attributed:

“Kevin Zeese,” the Fisher site reads, “officially announced that Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader will be consulting with Jeff Fisher and Jan Schneider regarding the investigation of voter fraud and a statewide recount for the state of Florida.”

When the nose-to-the-grindstone Countdown staff (as opposed to me, vacation boy) contacted Zeese, he said it was the first he’d heard of any ‘official announcement.’ Zeese acknowledges he’d spoken to Fisher, and surmises, correctly I think, that Fisher (he lost in the Florida 16th) and Schneider (she lost in the 13th, to Katherine Harris) were trying to increase their credibility by tying their efforts to the Nader campaign. Given the pounding Nader’s gotten for four years, Zeese laughed out loud at the irony.

Fisher has been cited in many places as claiming he has firm evidence of deliberate computer-hacking in the Florida vote, and was awaiting FBI agents with whom he was to share it. Not to dismiss him or his claims, but the show’s contact with him was not encouraging. He spoke vaguely of sources and whispered a lot.

Hell, ‘Deep Throat’ from Watergate whispered a lot.

Then again, so does the guy who wanders around Columbus Circle claiming the government caused the Red Sox to win the World Series.

We’ll reserve judgment on Mr. Fisher’s claims— and keep them out of this space until and unless they have stronger legs. But the “consulting” role with Nader isn’t the case, and bodes ill for Fisher’s other assertions.

Meanwhile in Ohio, it’s not exactly the lead story on Nightly News, but the verifying of the provisional ballots has gotten the attention of the most influential, and underrated, news source in the country— the Associated Press. It is from this wire service that most smaller newspapers and nearly all local and national radio and television news departments glean their national material (and from which, though they’d never admit it, most newspaper columnists, draw most of their data).

The AP reports that by yesterday, 11 of Ohio’s 88 counties had completed vetting the provisionals and that ten of the districts have accepted the validity of more than 90 percent of them. One— Belmont County (along the West Virginia border)— has tossed 42%, and nearing the halfway mark in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), the election board there has accepted about two-thirds.

And this afternoon, the AP’s TV and radio columnist Frazier Moore wrote a withering satire of the post-election television political landscape, so much in the manner of Jonathan Swift that it has been forwarded to me by conservatives claiming it “proves” there’s no reason to cover any voting issues. Generally speaking, mainstream silence seems to be passing: Sunday, the Hartford Courant printed an op-ed from the Associate Dean of the Yale Law School, Ian Solomon - one of those Democratic lawyers dispatched to Florida to ‘watch’ the election - who suggested the monitors had been too busy verifying the paper ballots to pay attention to the prospect of computerized irregularities (thus, Dean Solomon admitted, “I might have been an unwitting accessory to fraud.”)

The Boston Globe plans a piece on the silence— which still seems more a case of media passivity than conspiracy—in the next few days. Even the Washington Times addressed it yesterday (albeit with the headline “Anti-Bush Internet Site Angles For Election Probe”) by focusing on MoveOn.org’s “Investigate the Vote” campaign. Jerrold Nadler of New York, one of six Democratic congressmen who demanded an investigation by the General Accountability Office in the days after the election, says now he anticipates a response from the GAO by the end of this week, and that could stir the pot a little further.

We may even have seen something of a reaction to this story on Fox News. There, our old loofah-wielding friend Bill O’Reilly is at it again, wandering further and further into semi-lucidity and self-contradiction. As reported by Brian Stelter over at TVNewser O’Reilly managed to put himself at direct odds with his own boss, Roger Ailes.

“The Pew Research Center is out with which media was most trusted during the presidential campaign,” O’Reilly stated Monday night. “On the TV side, Fox News wins big… Dead last was MSNBC, which was six percent of Americans trusting them. Obviously they have major problems over there.”

As usual when dealing with the O’Reilly Fact-or-Fiction, he leaves himself so open to fact-checking on so many fronts, that it’s difficult to decide where to thrust the first sword.

Let’s start with the Pew poll. Firstly, it had nothing to do with which media was “most trusted” — it only asked where people got most of their news on the election. And using Fox’s own criteria— they’re right and everybody else ranges from liberal to treasonous— they were cited as the respondents’ primary source by 21%, compared to the NBC/MSNBC/CNBC combination (also 21%), and compared to the combined three broadcast network news departments (29%). The Internet was also cited as a primary source by 21%, suggesting respondents were permitted to give more than one answer. This not only isn’t “Fox News wins big;” using some of the same massaging of numbers O’Reilly is fond of, it’s not even ‘Fox News wins at all.’

Sorry about that “massaging” reference to O’Reilly in there. Poor choice of words.

Most intriguingly, O’Reilly’s employer, Mr. Ailes, recently dismissed the company that did the survey O’Reilly trumpeted so loudly. In its recent piece on the network, "The New York Times" noted that Pew’s June survey reported that 41 percent of Fox News viewers identified themselves as Republicans, and 52 percent of them called themselves Conservatives.

Roger Ailes then told the paper that the Pew Research Center had produced “a totally fraudulent survey done by a bunch of liberals.”

So O’Reilly is reduced to relying on a polling company that his boss believes traffics in ‘totally fraudulent surveys,’ to altering the questions posed by that company to fit his own boasts, and to accepting those numbers he likes from that polling and ignoring the ones he doesn’t.

Sounds like somebody hasn’t had a good falafel in awhile.

Comments? E-mail me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com

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GOP Pushes Rule Change to Protect DeLay's Post

Washington Post
November 17, 2004

GOP Pushes Rule Change to Protect DeLay's Post

House Republicans proposed changing their rules Tuesday night to allow members indicted by state grand juries to remain in a leadership post, a move that would benefit Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), according to GOP leaders.

Complete article at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54572-2004Nov16.html

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The Bush Revolution

The New York Times
November 17, 2004

The Bush Revolution
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Having crushed the resistance in Falluja, President Bush is now trying to do the same at the State Department and the C.I.A.

Colin Powell may have "resigned," but don't kid yourself - the White House didn't want him. Mr. Powell's own statement said that he and Mr. Bush "came to the mutual agreement that it would be appropriate for me to leave at this time."

The real winner in this foreign policy wrestling match is Dick Cheney. One of his former aides, Stephen Hadley, will now be the national security adviser, and Condoleezza Rice was run over so many times by Mr. Cheney in the first term that she'll be docile at State.

In a conversation with the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, Mr. Powell once referred in frustration to Mr. Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz as "[expletive] crazies," according to a recent British biography of Tony Blair. Mr. Powell had a point, but they're getting the last laugh.

The central question of President Bush's second term is this: Will he shaft his Christian-right supporters, since he doesn't need them any more, and try to secure his legacy with moderate policies that might unite the country? Or, with no re-election to worry about, will he pursue revolutionary changes on the right? To me, it looks increasingly like the latter.

Many liberals are still enraged at Mr. Powell for misleading the world about Iraqi W.M.D. in his U.N. speech. Fair enough. But wait six months, and they'll fervently wish they had him back. The reality is that Mr. Powell was a voice of reason in foreign policy discussions ranging from Pakistan to Venezuela. Without him, foreign relations would have been even more catastrophic.

On North Korea, Iraq and Europe, Mr. Powell was like the man in the circus who follows the elephants, cleaning up their messes. Yet his even more useful role in the administration was not sensible diplomacy. It was his willingness to disagree, to offer another viewpoint. He pushed back.

Condoleezza Rice is smart, diligent and honest, but she has zero record of pushing back. And that's what Mr. Bush needs - somebody besides Laura who will tell him when he's about to do something stupid.

He needs lots of those somebodies in the intelligence community, whose crucial role is not so much to steal secrets abroad but to resist political pressures at home and offer unwelcome analyses. That will be much less likely now that heads are rolling down the corridors of the C.I.A.'s directorate of operations.

It's fair to replace Mr. Powell, a political appointee, but the spies being pushed out at Langley are career professionals. The intelligence community's best assets aren't those spying for us in foreign capitals, but the thousands of Americans at the C.I.A., the D.I.A., the N.S.A. and the rest of the alphabet soup of spookdom. Their morale - already bad - will suffer a further dive, along with their effectiveness.

So what should we expect in a second term?

A squeeze on North Korea The hawks have been impatient with what they see as the coddling of North Korea, and unless there is progress soon, there will be a push to get tougher and apply sanctions.

A continued embrace of Ariel Sharon With Mr. Powell out, there will be no one in the administration pushing Mr. Bush toward a more balanced policy. Tony Blair will try, but he's too far away.

A collision with Iran When Iran's new agreement with Europe on curbing its nuclear programs falls apart, the U.S. will resume its push for regime change in Iran (ironically, pushing for regime change in Iran and Cuba is what keeps those regimes in power). Then the U.S. will discuss whether to look the other way as Israel launches airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

Dithering on Darfur Mr. Powell traveled to Darfur, proclaimed the slaughter there to be genocide and quietly pushed within the administration to get some action. I wish he had done much more, but, by contrast, the White House has been lackadaisical.

A litmus test of foreign policy prospects will be whether John Bolton, a genial raptor among the doves at State, is promoted to be its deputy secretary. For liberals who have been wavering on whether to move to New Zealand, that would be a sign to head for the airport.

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The Curtain Just Retired

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Will the Moderates Speak Up?

washingtonpost.com

Will the Moderates Speak Up?

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004; Page A25

So will moderate Republicans stand up? Or will the Republican right render them even more impotent than they were before Nov. 2?

With our nation's capital now under even firmer Republican domination, conservatives are claiming a mandate for everything from the partial privatization of Social Security to a transformation of the judiciary. The moderates have a choice of going along with a swing to the right or fighting for the power to influence policies in their direction.

Moderate Republicans win in the blue states by saying they are different from Tom DeLay and other Republican right-wingers. But in Washington, they are punished if they act on what they tell the voters.

Consider the case of Sen. Arlen Specter, just reelected from Pennsylvania, a state that supported John Kerry. Specter is a Republican who supports abortion rights. Now the Republican right wants to deny him the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee, for which he is in line through seniority.

Specter's sin? He took the same position on the abortion question after the election as he did before. Here's the post-election statement that has the conservatives wanting to deny Specter his chairmanship:

"When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely," Specter said. "The president is well aware of what happened when a bunch of his nominees were sent up with the filibuster."

Specter was stating the obvious: that many Democrats are likely to try to block an anti-Roe nominee. But conservatives viewed Specter's comment as heresy, and Specter can't count on much support from Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

The Tennessee Republican wants to run for president. He knows how important it is in Republican primaries to pander to the right. So on "Fox News Sunday," Frist piously declared that Specter's statements "were disheartening to me" and "disheartening to a lot of people."

This is a revealing moment. Republicans like to say that they are more open on the abortion issue than Democrats, because abortion-rights foes have no place in the Democratic Party. That's a strange claim, since Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), an opponent of abortion rights, is about to become Frist's counterpart for the Senate's Democratic minority. Former representative David Bonior was the House whip and thus the No. 2 Democrat in the leadership until he stepped down to run for governor of Michigan in 2002. Bonior is also a right-to-lifer.

Query: Which party is really open on the abortion issue?

Republicans are fine with their members being for abortion rights if that's what they have to tell voters to hold their seats. But such Republicans can expect only resistance if they dare to rise to the top and expect any meaningful influence on the issue.

How long will moderate Republicans accept being kicked around? It's about a lot more than abortion. In the House, DeLay, the party's strongman, won't even let moderate legislation get to the floor. He insists that his party's moderates support internal procedures that cut off all possibility of genuinely bipartisan compromise. Will the moderate Republicans just keep going along?

Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, isn't expecting much. "With the exceptions of Lincoln Chafee and Jim Leach," says Frank, referring to the Republican senator from Rhode Island and the liberal Republican House member from Iowa, "Republicans will be with us as long as their votes are irrelevant to the outcome."

Frank adds: "Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can't do anything because they're tied up in knots."

Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware is one of those moderate Republicans, a thoughtful former governor who wishes politics was less polarized. He sees the moderates as having less power now because of the election of more conservatives to both houses. Yet Castle still hopes moderation might have its day, because the president "is going to want to build a legacy that is a little broader than it is so far."

Moderates, he says, "might be more willing to take independent positions" because Bush won't be on the ballot again and maverick votes won't be seen as endangering his reelection.

I respect Castle, but I have trouble sharing his optimism. It's often said that the polarization within our nation's political elite doesn't match a more moderate mood in the electorate. But if Washington's Republican leadership uses its power to ram through a conservative agenda while denying moderates any meaningful role, moderation will have no chance. Will the moderate Republicans take a stand, or will they continue to be complicit in their own powerlessness?

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Election Fraud update: Volusia County on lockdown

From blackboxvoting.org

TUESDAY NOV 16 2004: Volusia County on lockdown

County election records just got put on lockdown

Dueling lawyers, election officials gnashing teeth, Votergate.tv film crew catching it all.

Here's what happened so far:

Friday Black Box Voting investigators Andy Stephenson and Kathleen Wynne popped in to ask for some records. They were rebuffed by an elections official named Denise. Bev Harris called on the cell phone from investigations in downstate Florida, and told Volusia County Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe that Black Box Voting would be in to pick up the Nov. 2 Freedom of Information request, or would file for a hand recount. "No, Bev, please don't do that!" Lowe exclaimed. But this is the way it has to be, folks. Black Box Voting didn't back down.

Monday Bev, Andy and Kathleen came in with a film crew and asked for the FOIA request. Deanie Lowe gave it over with a smile, but Harris noticed that one item, the polling place tapes, were not copies of the real ones, but instead were new printouts, done on Nov. 15, and not signed by anyone.

Harris asked to see the real ones, and they said for "privacy" reasons they can't make copies of the signed ones. She insisted on at least viewing them (although refusing to give copies of the signatures is not legally defensible, according to Berkeley elections attorney, Lowell Finley). They said the real ones were in the County Elections warehouse. It was quittin' time and an arrangment was made to come back this morning to review them.

Lana Hires, a Volusia County employee who gained some notoriety in an election 2000 Diebold memo, where she asked for an explanation of minus 16,022 votes for Gore, so she wouldn't have to stand there "looking dumb" when the auditor came in, was particularly unhappy about seeing the Black Box Voting investigators in the office. She vigorously shook her head when Deanie Lowe suggested going to the warehouse.

Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris showed up at the warehouse at 8:15 Tuesday morning, Nov. 16. There was Lana Hires looking especially gruff, yet surprised. She ordered them out. Well, they couldn't see why because there she was, with a couple other people, handling the original poll tapes. You know, the ones with the signatures on them. Harris and Wynne stepped out and Volusia County officials promptly shut the door.

There was a trash bag on the porch outside the door. Harris looked into it and what do you know, but there were poll tapes in there. They came out and glared at Harris and Wynne, who drove away a small bit, and then videotaped the license plates of the two vehicles marked 'City Council' member. Others came out to glare and soon all doors were slammed.

So, Harris and Wynne went and parked behind a bus to see what they would do next. They pulled out some large pylons, which blocked the door. Harris decided to go look at the garbage some more while Wynne videotaped. A man who identified himself as "Pete" came out and Harris immediately wrote a public records request for the contents of the garbage bag, which also contained ballots -- real ones, but not filled out.

A brief tug of war occurred, tearing the garbage bag open. Harris and Wynne then looked through it, as Pete looked on. He was quite friendly.

Black Box Voting collected various poll tapes and other information and asked if they could copy it, for the public records request. "You won't be going anywhere," said Pete. "The deputy is on his way."

Yes, not one but two police cars came up and then two county elections officials, and everyone stood around discussing the merits of the "black bag" public records request.

The police finally let Harris and Wynne go, about the time the Votergate.tv film crew arrived, and everyone trooped off to the elections office. There, the plot thickened.

Black Box Voting began to compare the special printouts given in the FOIA request with the signed polling tapes from election night. Lo and behold, some were missing. By this time, Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson had joined the group at Volusia County. Some polling place tapes didn't match. In fact, in one location, precinct 215, an African-American precinct, the votes were off by hundreds, in favor of George W. Bush and other Republicans.

Hmm. Which was right? The polling tape Volusia gave to Black Box Voting, specially printed on Nov. 15, without signatures, or the ones with signatures, printed on Nov. 2, with up to 8 signatures per tape?

Well, then it became even more interesting. A Volusia employee boxed up some items from an office containing Lana Hires' desk, which appeared to contain -- you guessed it -- polling place tapes. The employee took them to the back of the building and disappeared.

Then, Ellen B., a voting integrity advocate from Broward County, Florida, and Susan, from Volusia, decided now would be a good time to go through the trash at the elections office. Lo and behold, they found all kinds of memos and some polling place tapes, fresh from Volusia elections office.

So, Black Box Voting compared these with the Nov. 2 signed ones and the "special' ones from Nov. 15 given, unsigned, finding several of the MISSING poll tapes. There they were: In the garbage.

So, Wynne went to the car and got the polling place tapes she had pulled from the warehouse garbage. My my my. There were not only discrepancies, but a polling place tape that was signed by six officials.

This was a bit disturbing, since the employees there had said that bag was destined for the shredder.

By now, a county lawyer had appeared on the scene, suddenly threatening to charge Black Box Voting extra for the time spent looking at the real stuff Volusia had withheld earlier. Other lawyers appeared, phoned, people had meetings, Lana glowered at everyone, and someone shut the door in the office holding the GEMS server.

Black Box Voting investigator Andy Stephenson then went to get the Diebold "GEMS" central server locked down. He also got the memory cards locked down and secured, much to the dismay of Lana. They were scattered around unsecured in any way before that.

Everyone agreed to convene tomorrow morning, to further audit, discuss the hand count that Black Box Voting will require of Volusia County, and of course, it is time to talk about contesting the election in Volusia.

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Domestic terrorism: New trouble at home

Domestic terrorism: New trouble at home

Mon Nov 15, 2004

By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY

Since Sept. 11, the nation's attention has been focused on possible threats from Islamic terrorists. But home-grown terrorists have been steadily plotting and carrying out attacks in unrelated incidents across the nation, according to federal authorities and two organizations that monitor hate groups.

None of the incidents over the past few years matched the devastation of 9/11 or even the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 and remains the deadliest act of terrorism against the nation by a U.S. citizen.

But some of the alleged domestic terrorists who have been arrested had ambitious plans. The people and groups range from white supremacists, anti-government types and militia members to eco-terrorists and people who hate corporations. They include violent anti-abortionists and black and brown nationalists who envision a separate state for blacks and Latinos. And they have been busy.

"Not a lot of attention is being paid to this, because everybody is concerned about the guy in a turban. But there are still plenty of angry, Midwestern white guys out there," says U.S. Marshals Service chief inspector Geoff Shank.

Shank, who is based in the Chicago area, says the concerns about domestic terrorism range from anti-abortion extremists who threaten to attack clinics and doctors to some violent biker gangs that may be involved in organized crime. And the FBI (news - web sites) said in June that eco-terrorism - acts of violence, sabotage or property damage motivated by concern for animals or the environment - was the nation's top domestic terrorism threat. The bureau said then that eco-terrorists had committed more than 1,100 criminal acts and caused property damage estimated at least $110 million since 1976.

Alleged terrorist plots by U.S. citizens are not new, but many of the recent conspiracies were overshadowed by 9/11 and the hunt for terrorists abroad. Most of the foiled plots didn't get very far. And few got much publicity. But there were some potentially close calls, such as the scheme by William Krar, an east Texas man who stockpiled enough sodium cyanide to gas everyone in a building the size of a high school basketball gymnasium before he was arrested in 2002.

Shank, whose unit mainly searches for fugitives, including some wanted on domestic terror-related charges, led the manhunt for Clayton Lee Waagner, 48, of Kennerdell, Pa. Waagner was convicted in December of mailing hundreds of threat letters containing bogus anthrax to abortion clinics in 24 states. During his trial in Philadelphia, prosecutors documented Waagner's ties to the Army of God, an extremist group that believes violence against abortion providers is an acceptable way to end abortion.

'A very serious threat'

"There's been a very, very heavy focus nationally on foreign terrorism since 9/11," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which has tracked hate groups since 1971. "The reality is that, meanwhile, domestic terrorism has hummed along at quite a steady clip. It ... still poses a very serious threat."

Among the incidents since 9/11:

• Last month in Tennessee, the FBI arrested a man who agents say hated the federal government and was attempting to acquire chemical weapons and explosives to blow up a government building. Demetrius "Van" Crocker, 39, of McKenzie, Tenn., pleaded not guilty Nov. 5. His attorney, public defender Stephen Shankman, did not return calls.

• In May, Krar, 63, of Noonday, Texas, was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison after he stockpiled enough sodium cyanide to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot building. Krar, described by federal prosecutors as a white supremacist, also had nine machine guns, 67 sticks of explosives and more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition. Investigators and the federal prosecutor said they didn't know what Krar intended to do with the potentially deadly chemicals. Krar's common-law wife, Judith Bruey, 55, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess illegal weapons and was sentenced to nearly five years.

• Last month in Utah, two men described by the U.S. attorney there as "domestic terrorists" pleaded guilty to setting separate arson fires related to eco-terrorism. Justus Ireland, 23, admitted starting a fire that caused $1.5 million damage at a West Jordan lumber company and spray-painting "ELF" at the site. The Earth Liberation Front has been connected to dozens of acts of vandalism and arson around the country since 1996. Joshua Demmitt, 18, of Provo, pleaded guilty to starting a fire at Brigham Young University's Ellsworth Farm, where animal experiments are conducted, in the name of the Animal Liberation Front. A third man, Harrison Burrows, 18, also of Provo, pleaded guilty earlier.

• In May, the FBI's domestic terrorism unit charged seven members of an animal rights group with terrorism after investigating what they said was a marked increase in crimes to stop the use of animals for product-testing. The activists, arrested in New York, New Jersey, California and Washington state, are members of Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. The group seeks to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences, a New Jersey product-testing company.

Prosecutors allege that the activists set fire to Huntingdon employees' cars, vandalized shareholders' homes and threatened their families. They are charged with conspiring to commit terrorism against an enterprise that uses animals for research and could face up to three years in prison if convicted.

• In May, a Brookfield, Wis., man labeled a domestic terrorist by federal prosecutors received an eight-year prison sentence for interfering with Madison police radio frequencies. Rajib Mitra, 26, had blocked police radio signals and later broadcast sex sounds over police radios. His attorney argued that the transmissions were an accident.

Mitra was one of the first defendants sentenced under guidelines changed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The changes, effective Nov. 5, 2003, impose stiffer penalties for domestic terrorism. Under the previous sentencing guidelines, Mitra probably would have been sentenced to 18 to 24 months.

Mitra's attorney, Chris Van Wagner, says his client was not a terrorist and should have received a lesser punishment. "It's clear that (the guidelines) were put in place to punish those who seek to subvert our government and not intended to increase the punishment for people who simply engage in criminal mischief but had no terrorist angle or connection whatsoever," Van Wagner says. "He was just a dolphin caught in a tuna net."

Mitra was charged under provisions of the Patriot Act that make it a crime to cause such public-safety problems, even if there were no monetary damages. "This is a vivid example of how the Patriot Act has been used in cases that clearly have nothing to do with terrorism and that are far removed from what Congress was concerned about when it passed the Patriot Act," says Timothy Edgar of the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites).

'Black helicopter' crowd

During the 1990s, anti-government groups sprang up all over the country, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism and now monitors hate groups. Many formed militias to prepare for large-scale resistance to the government, which the groups blamed for the Randy Weaver siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and the Branch Davidian confrontation in Waco, Texas, in 1993.

Many of these group members believed the federal government was secretly setting up concentration camps for dissident Americans and was planning a takeover of the United States by United Nations (news - web sites) troops as part of a "new world order." Many also said that mysterious black helicopters were conducting surveillance in the West, according to the ADL.

"The 'black helicopter' crowd is still out there," says Wisconsin federal prosecutor Tim O'Shea, referring to extremists who distrust and abhor the federal government.

Potok says the Southern Poverty Law Center identified 751 hate groups last year, a 6% increase over the 708 such organizations it counted in 2002.

Mark Pitcavage, director of fact-finding for the Anti-Defamation League, says incidents of domestic terrorism often don't get much media coverage beyond the local areas where they occur. He says he was surprised that the Krar case did not get wider attention. "This was the only case in U.S. history where we had a person in the U.S. building an actual chemical weapon," he says.

He cites two other cases. In 1997, militia members gathered in central Texas allegedly to plan to attack a military base on Independence Day. They were arrested the morning of July 4 near Fort Hood. Three years later, he says, three heavily armed people described by federal investigators as anti-government extremists shot down a California Highway Patrol helicopter near the California-Nevada border during a standoff with police.

Potok, director of the center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups, says, "I don't mean to minimize the work of groups with ties to al-Qaeda. Obviously, there's a huge external threat as well. But there's a tendency to want to externalize the threat and say the people who want to hurt us don't look like us, they don't worship the same god and don't have the same skin color."

Earlier this year, the National District Attorneys Association, which has about 7,000 members, held a first-ever conference on domestic terrorism in Washington, D.C., to help local prosecutors identify potential terrorist groups.

"It was very well received," says the association's vice president, Robert Honecker, a prosecutor in Monmouth County, N.J. "They were appreciative of getting the information and the knowledge so they would be prepared should something happen in their jurisdiction."

Man sought nuclear materials

Some of the alleged efforts by domestic terrorists are chilling.

According to an FBI affidavit in the Tennessee case, Crocker had inquired last spring about where he could obtain nuclear waste or nuclear materials. An informant told the FBI that Crocker, who had "absolute hatred" for the government, wanted "to build a bomb to be detonated at a government building, particularly a courthouse, either federal or state."

In September, according to the affidavit, Crocker told an undercover FBI agent "it would be a good thing if somebody could detonate some sort of weapon of mass destruction in Washington, D.C.," while both houses of Congress "were in session." Crocker allegedly told the agent he admired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. He said "establishing a concentration camp for Jewish insurance executives would be a desirable endeavor."

Crocker later bought what he thought was Sarin nerve gas and a block of C-4 explosive from the undercover agent, the affidavit says.

Authorities arrested Crocker last month. Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League says such arrests thwart possible attacks and show that U.S. law enforcement is effectively fighting domestic terrorism.

"One of the measures of this is that the number of people arrested for (plotting) terrorist acts is far greater than the number of people arrested for carrying out such attacks. So we're arresting them before they can carry out these acts, which is very important. 9/11 raised awareness generally among law enforcement."

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KERRY WON OHIO -- JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS

KERRY WON OHIO
JUST COUNT THE BALLOTS AT THE BACK OF THE BUS
In These Times
Friday, November 12, 2004
Most voters in Ohio chose Kerry. Here's how the votes vanished.

By Greg Palast

This February, Ken Blackwell, Ohio's Secretary of State, told his State Senate President, "The possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity." Blackwell, co-chair of Bush-Cheney reelection campaign, wasn't warning his fellow Republican of disaster, but boasting of an opportunity to bring in Ohio for Team Bush no matter what the voters wanted. And most voters in Ohio wanted JFK, not GWB. But their choice won't count because their votes won't be counted.

The ballots that add up to a majority for John Kerry in Ohio -- and in New Mexico -- are locked up in two Republican hidey-holes: "spoiled" ballots and "provisional" ballots.

OHIO SPOILED ROTTEN
American democracy has a dark little secret. In a typical presidential election, two million ballots are simply chucked in the garbage, marked "spoiled" and not counted. A dive into the electoral dumpster reveals something special about these votes left to rot. In a careful county-by-county, precinct-by-precinct analysis of the Florida 2000 race, the US Civil Rights Commission discovered that 54% of the votes in the spoilage bin were cast by African-Americans. And Florida, Heaven help us, is typical. Nationwide, the number of Black votes "disappeared" into the spoiled pile is approximately one million. The other million in the no-count pit come mainly from Hispanic, Native-American and poor white precincts, a decidedly Democratic demographic.

Ohio Republicans, simultaneously in charge of both the Bush-Cheney get-out-the-vote drive and the state's vote-counting rules, doggedly and systematically insured the spoilage pile would be as high as the White House.

Vote spoilage comes in two flavors. There are "overvotes" -- too many punches in the cards, and "undervotes." Here we find the hanging, dimpled and "pregnant" chads created by old, dysfunctional punch card machines, in which the bit of paper covering the hole doesn't fall out, but hangs on. Machines can't read these, but we humans, who know a hole when we see one, have no problem reading these cards … if allowed to. This is how Katherine Harris defeated Al Gore, by halting the hand count of the spoiled punch cards not, as is generally believed, by halting a "recount."

Whose chads are left hanging? In Florida in 2000 federal investigators determined that Black voters' ballots spoiled 900% more often than white voters, mainly due to punch card error. Ohio Republicans found those racial odds quite attractive. The state was the only one of fifty to refuse to eliminate or fix these vote-eating machines, even in the face of a lawsuit by the ACLU.

Apparently, the Ohio Republicans like what the ACLU found. The civil rights group's expert testimony concluded that Ohio's cussed insistence on forcing 73% of its electorate to use punch card machines had an "overwhelming" racial bias, voiding votes mostly in Black precincts. Blackwell doesn't disagree; and he hopes to fix the machinery … sometime after George Bush's next inauguration. In the meantime, the state's Attorney General Jim Petro, a Republican, strategically postponed the trial date of the ACLU case until after the election.

Fixing a punch card machine is cheap and easy. If Ohio simply placed a card-reading machine in each polling station, as Michigan did this year, voters could have checked to ensure their vote would tally. If not, they would have gotten another card.
Blackwell knows that. He also knows that if those reading machines had been installed, almost all the 93,000 spoiled votes, overwhelmingly Democratic, would have closed the gap on George Bush's lead of 136,000 votes.

JIM CROW'S PROVISIONAL BALLOT

Add to the spoiled ballots a second group of uncounted votes, the 'provisional' ballots, and -- voila! -- the White House would have turned Democrat blue.

But that won't happen because of the peculiar way provisional ballots are counted or, more often, not counted. Introduced by federal law in 2002, the provisional ballot was designed especially for voters of color. Proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus to save the rights of those wrongly scrubbed from voter rolls, it was, in Republican-controlled swing states, twisted into a back-of-the-bus ballot unlikely to be tallied.

Unlike the real thing, these ballots are counted only by the whimsy and rules of a state's top elections official; and in Ohio, that gives a virtually ballot veto to Bush-Cheney campaign co-chair, Blackwell.

Mr. Blackwell has a few rules to make sure a large proportion of provisional ballots won't be counted. For the first time in memory, the Secretary of State has banned counting ballots cast in the "wrong" precinct, though all neighborhoods share the same President.

Over 155,000 Ohio voters were shunted to these second-class ballots. The election-shifting bulge in provisional ballots (more than 3% of the electorate) was the direct result of the national Republican strategy that targeted African-American precincts for mass challenges on election day.

This is the first time in four decades that a political party has systematically barred -- in this case successfully -- hundreds of thousands of Black voters from access to the voting booth. While investigating for BBC Television, we obtained three dozen of the Republican Party's confidential "caging" lists, their title for spreadsheets listing names and addresses of voters they intended to block on any pretext.

We found that every single address of the thousands on these Republican hit lists was located in Black-majority precincts. You might find that nasty and racist. It may also be a crime.

Before 1965, Jim Crow laws in the Deep South did not bar Blacks from voting. Rather, the segregationist game was played by applying minor technical voting requirements only to African-Americans. That year, Congress voted to make profiling and impeding minority voters, even with a legal pretext, a criminal offence under the Voting Rights Act.

But that didn't stop the Republicans of '04. Their legally questionable mass challenge to Black voters is not some low-level dirty tricks operation of local party hacks. Emails we obtained show the lists were copied directly to the Republican National Committee's chief of research and to the director of a state campaign.

Many challenges center on changes of address. On one Republican caging list, 50 addresses changed from Jacksonville to overseas, African-American soldiers shipped Over There.

You don't have to guess the preferences registered on the provisional ballots. Republicans went on a challenging rampage, while Democrats pledged to hold to the tradition of letting voters vote.

Blackwell has said he will count all the "valid" provisional ballots. However, his rigid regulations, like the new guess-your-precinct rule, are rigged to knock out enough voters to keep Bush's skinny lead alive. Other pre-election maneuvers by Republican officials -- late and improbably large purges of voter rolls, rejection of registrations -- maximized the use of provisional ballots which will never be counted. For example, a voter wrongly tagged an ineligible "felon" voter (and there's plenty in that category, mostly African-Americans), will lose their ballot even though they are wrongly identified.


KERRY BLACKS OUT
It was heartening that, during his campaign, John Kerry broke the political omerta that seems to prohibit public mention of the color of votes not counted in America. "Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth a million disenfranchised African Americans is the best we can do." The Senator promised the NAACP convention, "This November, we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted."

But this week, Kerry became the first presidential candidate in history to break a campaign promise after losing an election. The Senator waited less than 24 hours to abandon more than a quarter million Ohio voters still waiting for their provisional and chad-spoiled ballots to be counted.

While disappointing, I can understand the cold calculus against taking the fight to the end. To count the ballots, Kerry's lawyers would, first, have to demand a hand reading of the punch cards. Blackwell, armed with the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore diktat, would undoubtedly pull a "Kate Harris" by halting or restricting a hand count. Most daunting, Kerry's team would also, as one state attorney general pointed out to me, have to litigate each and every rejected provisional ballot in court. This would entail locating up to a hundred thousand voters to testify to their right to the vote, with Blackwell challenging each with a holster full of regulations from the old Jim Crow handbook.

Given the odds and the cost to his political career, Kerry bent, not to the will of the people, but to the will to power of the Ohio Republican machine.

We have yet to total here the votes lost in missing absentee ballots, in eyebrow-raising touch screen tallies, in purges of legal voters from registries and other games played in swing states. But why dwell on these things? Our betters in the political and media elite have told us to get over it, move on.

To the victors go the spoils of electoral class war. As Ohio's politically ambitious Secretary of State brags on his own website, "Last time I checked, Katherine Harris wasn't in a soup line, she's in Congress."


NEW MEXICO GOES KERRY - BUT WHO'S COUNTING?

Why single out Ohio? So it also went in New Mexico where ballots of Hispanic voters (two-to-one Kerry supporters) spoil at a rate five times that of white voters. Add in the astounding 13,000 provisional ballots in the Enchanted State -- handed out "like candy" to Hispanic, not white, voters according to a director of the Catholic Church's get-out-the-vote drive -- and Kerry wins New Mexico. Just count up the votes … but that won't happen.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast is author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin 2004).

Oliver Shykles and Matthew Pascarella of GregPalast.com contributed to this article.

View Greg Palast's BBC Television film, "Bush Family Fortunes," now available on DVD, at http://www.gregpalast.com/bff-dvd.htm

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Some Small Shoes to Fill

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

THE CABINET SHUFFLE
And Some Small Shoes to Fill

Three other cabinet members announced their departures yesterday, virtually ignored in the shadow of Colin Powell's resignation. Their accomplishments, or lack thereof, say a lot about the president's first term and the prospects for his second.

When George W. Bush called himself a "compassionate conservative," he invariably pointed to his No Child Left Behind reform plan. As secretary of education, Rod Paige argued valiantly for the premise behind the law: that poor minority children deserve the same skilled teachers and high-quality schools as their affluent counterparts. But beyond the words, Dr. Paige turned out to be politically tone-deaf and a disastrous manager. His failures were recently outlined in a scalding report from the Government Accountability Office. The report noted that the department had squandered the authority given to it under the law and had failed even to provide written state-specific instructions to local governments attempting to comply with the new rules.

Among the people most mentioned as a possible successor for Dr. Paige is Margaret Spellings, Mr. Bush's chief domestic policy adviser and a principal architect of No Child Left Behind. Her background would give her both credibility and closer ties with the White House than Dr. Paige enjoyed. But whoever takes the job will need to make wholesale changes in the top echelons of the Education Department, which has been busier currying favor with religious organizations and the school voucher forces than carrying out the central mission at hand. Unless the department changes course quickly, it will miss the opportunity to ensure that the states comply with the all-important requirement for every classroom to have a highly qualified teacher.

As agriculture secretary, Ann Veneman generally toed the administration's pro-industry line on issues like forest policy and food safety. But she provided one notably fresh initiative in 2001, when she endorsed a new farm policy that would have drastically trimmed old-fashioned subsidies in favor of freer markets and more generous land conservation programs - a form of aid that is particularly helpful to small farmers. Unfortunately, the White House failed to give her much support in the face of Congressional resistance. The result was a swollen farm bill that greatly increased conservation spending but kept most of the old subsidies intact.

Ms. Veneman also began well on the area of forest policy, endorsing a strategy to prevent forest fires that would have focused on overgrown forests near at-risk communities while leaving the more valuable old-growth trees in remote areas pretty much alone. Within a year, however, under pressure from the timber industry, the White House and Congress, she reversed course in favor of a strategy that encouraged more aggressive commercial logging with only a modest payoff in fire suppression.

The energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, arrived at his cabinet post with the dubious distinction of having introduced a bill, when he was a United States senator, to abolish the very department Mr. Bush asked him to run. With that beginning, it's not surprising that Mr. Abraham pursued a pro-industry strategy that did little to steer the country to an energy future that would be cleaner, more efficient and less oil-dependent. To his credit, he began several useful steps to collect and safeguard nuclear materials that the United States and Russia had scattered around the world for research reactors. We have little hope that Mr. Abraham's successor will do any better at encouraging energy conservation, but given the president's campaign speeches about the importance of curbing nuclear proliferation, we hope that the next secretary will follow up on his lead on that critical initiative.

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Good Soldier Powell

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

THE CABINET SHUFFLE
Good Soldier Powell

As Secretary of State Colin Powell resigned yesterday, reportedly to be succeeded by the national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, it was hard to avoid the feeling that this imposing figure - who once personified the dignity, integrity and promise of government service and was the first African-American considered to have a shot at the White House - will be remembered for one picture and three sentences.

On Feb. 5, 2003, in an appearance before the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Powell, the retired four-star general and former national security adviser, held up a vial of white powder as a symbol of what he claimed - falsely, as it turned out - were Iraq's huge stockpiles of anthrax. He offered a scathing indictment of Saddam Hussein. "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,'' he said. "These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."

As an increasingly angry world soon learned, Mr. Powell in fact offered half-truths, poorly analyzed intelligence and outright fantasies, from a nuclear weapons program in Baghdad that didn't exist to wildly exaggerated estimates of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and its ties to Al Qaeda.

But at the time, Mr. Powell's performance convinced many Americans skeptical about the war that the Iraqi government was a clear and present danger to the rest of the world. His enormous stature and his image as a moderating force within the administration - valued especially by America's European allies - were squandered in defending a unilateral decision he did not agree with to launch a war in which he did not really seem to believe.

From the start of his tenure as secretary of state, there was a question about which Colin Powell had moved into Foggy Bottom. Was it the decisive, charismatic general who coined a military doctrine that called for waging war only after the establishment of a political consensus behind achievable goals and then the commitment of overwhelming force to reach those ends? Or was it the faithful soldier who prized loyalty above all else?

Mr. Powell began with promise, forcing the long-neglected issues of Africa to the forefront of the administration's agenda. Even after 9/11, when those issues naturally took the back seat, the über-Powell was forever being rumored to be on the cusp of emerging and asserting himself over Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and even Vice President Dick Cheney.

But it's now clear that Mr. Powell long ago chose loyalty over leadership and was not a major figure in the biggest foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration. Most accounts of the rush to war in Iraq show that Mr. Powell was deeply troubled about the planning for the war, its timing and the intense opposition of most of Washington's European allies. But he was unwilling or unable to exert much influence over the president in that critical time, and it's not clear whether Mr. Bush even consulted him before making his decision to go to war.

There were moments in his tenure when Mr. Powell could have resigned over principle. But he soldiered on, leaving when it was safe and convenient for his boss. Yesterday, he told the world that he'd long ago given up any ambition of sticking around for a second term. In the end, his legacy may simply be that the administration that bungled the handling of a war because the president failed to heed the Powell Doctrine was the one in which Mr. Powell himself served.

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Debt Doubles at Agency that Insures Pension Plans

The New York Times
November 16, 2004

Debt Doubles at Agency that Insures Pension Plans
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

The federal agency that insures pension plans said yesterday that its deficit, already at the highest in its history, had doubled in its last fiscal year, to $23.3 billion.

Over a 12-month period, the agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, incurred losses of $12.1 billion, according to the agency's audited annual report for fiscal 2004. Much of the loss was a result of pension fund failures in the airline industry.

The agency, created in 1974 to be the federal safety net when pensions fail, has now lost an average of $10 billion a year for the last three years, according to one estimate. The mounting losses come at a time when the agency is responsible for paying the pensions for more than one million people covered by pension plans that failed.

The agency's executive director, Bradley D. Belt, called on Congress yesterday to address the situation quickly, "so the problem doesn't spiral out of control." He said that the Bush administration was preparing a plan for a comprehensive overhaul of the pension system, which it would propose early next year.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is paid premiums by companies that offer traditional pension plans. But it does not have the legal authority to raise those premiums or take other fundamental steps to bring its finances back into balance. Such measures would have to be enacted by Congress.

Congress, however, has not addressed the problems of America's pension system in a comprehensive way since the late 1980's, when a number of large steel companies with traditional pension plans defaulted. Since then, lawmakers have made some lesser amendments to the system, but even those have been made with great difficulty. The issues involved are complicated, and any true pension reform will be costly to someone - either companies, workers or the federal government.

Experts warn that waiting will not make the troubles go away. The system of regulating and insuring traditional pensions called defined-benefit pensions is increasingly resembling the system that did the same for the savings and loan industry two decades ago.

Congress had difficulty correcting that system's structural problems as well. As a result, there were delays and missteps, and the problems had years to grow and deepen. In the end, the entire system collapsed in 1989 and Congress had to authorize a federal bailout that cost about $200 billion.

"The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is living on borrowed time," said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has followed the troubles in the pension system closely. He issued a statement yesterday saying the possibility of "an S.& L.-style taxpayer bailout of the agency to the tune of billions of dollars has increased."

In announcing the pension agency's latest financial results, Mr. Belt, the executive director, said that it was not running out of cash. With reserves of $39 billion, he said, it should be able to keep sending retirees their pension checks "for a number of years," even if Congress does nothing.

The problem is that the pensions the agency must pay retirees are much larger than the reserves, Mr. Belt said. The pensions owed retirees measure $62.3 billion in today's dollars.

Unless the agency finds a way to close the gap between the $39 billion that it has and the $62 billion that it owes, it will run out of money at some point. In that case, either retirees will be denied their benefits, or else Congress will have to appropriate money for a bailout.

Mr. Belt also noted that the agency's problems were worsening at a time when the general economic environment has been improving. He said the agency now faced $96 billion worth of risk from companies that are "reasonably possible" to default on their pension promises. The comparable number a year ago was just $82 billion.

The pension agency identifies such companies by looking at their corporate credit ratings, together with the weakness of their pension funds.

The agency does not identify the companies whose pension plans it expects to take over. Still, it is clear that the airline industry was responsible for much of the agency's loss for the fiscal year.

US Airways three pension funds are expected to cost the agency $2.1 billion. And United Airlines, a unit of UAL, recently announced that it would terminate all four of its pension plans as part of its efforts to emerge from bankruptcy. Taking over United's pensions alone will cost the agency an estimated $6.3 billion, by far the biggest pension insurance claim ever made by a single company. Accounting rules require the agency to book that loss in its fiscal 2004, even though it has not yet taken over United's plans.

Even before yesterday's announcement, analysts were warning that the pension agency needed help. Douglas J. Elliott, president of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions, said that if Congress took corrective action quickly, the cost would be small relative to the cost of a bailout some time in the future. The center is a nonpartisan research institute that examines the federal government's various lending and insurance programs.

Mr. Elliott said that the agency's new numbers brought its average losses to more than $10 billion a year for three years.

"This is a trend," he said. "This isn't something where you can just say, 'Well, that was a bad year, thank goodness we're over it.' "

In addition, the agency's fiscal 2004 was a year of general improvement in overall economic and financial conditions, Mr. Elliott said. Had interest rates not changed slightly in the agency's favor, its losses would have been even larger.

Congress is not expected to address the pension agency's problems in the current lame duck session because it already has a full workload. But some members said yesterday that they were concerned about the strength of the nation's pension system and hoped to introduce legislation early in 2005.

"This issue has wide-ranging implications on retirees, employers, workers, taxpayers and the government," said Representative John A. Boehner, the Ohio Republican who is the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Mr. Boehner said in a statement that he planned to introduce a bill in 2005 that would address what he called "systemic pension underfunding problems."

The Education and Workforce Committee has already held hearings on the problems of the pension system and possible remedies. Mr. Boehner said that in addition to making sure companies set aside enough money for their pensions, the bill would require companies to disclose clear information about their pension plans and pay adequate insurance premiums for their coverage.

In addition to the premiums it collects from companies, the pension insurance program receives the assets from the failed pension funds it takes over and invests them. It does not currently receive money from income tax receipts.

The insurance premiums have not been increased since 1994 and are thought to be inadequate relative to the amount of insurance coverage companies receive. United Airlines, for instance, has paid about $50 million in insurance premiums over the years, for coverage of its $6.3 billion claim.

Pension specialists also point out that the premiums do not have anything to do with the amount of risk companies bring to the pension insurance program. Companies with pension plans that do not have adequate funds do pay higher premiums than companies with strong plans. But that way of operating does not account for one of the most important signs of whether the plan will collapse or not: the company's own health.

A strong company with an unhealthy pension plan poses nowhere near the risk of a weak company with an unhealthy pension plan.

Mr. Boehner has suggested finding a way to distinguish between weak and strong companies, and charge higher premiums to the companies that pose greater risk.

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