Abortion Debate Still Tangled in Bankruptcy Bill

latimes.com

Abortion Debate Still Tangled in Bankruptcy Bill

The proposed law, which would make it harder for people to have their debts erased, may again have a provision aimed at clinic protesters.

By Maura Reynolds
Times Staff Writer

February 28, 2005

WASHINGTON — When Randall Terry filed for bankruptcy in 1998, he probably had little idea he was setting in motion a series of events that years later would entangle a congressional push to rewrite bankruptcy laws with a seemingly unrelated issue: abortion.

Terry, the founder of the antiabortion group Operation Rescue who led high-profile protests against abortion clinics in the 1980s and '90s, said he was filing for bankruptcy to avoid paying court damages resulting from his confrontational tactics.

"I will never let a cent of my money be seized to support the killing of the unborn," he was quoted as saying in news reports and court documents.

Six years later, in a legacy of those sometimes violent clashes over abortion clinic access, the fate of a much-debated bankruptcy bill may depend on whether Congress considers it appropriate for antiabortion protesters to file for bankruptcy to avoid paying fines.

Overhauling the bankruptcy code is the top item on the Senate's agenda as Congress reconvenes Monday after a week's recess. It is one of the changes to the legal system that Republicans are eager to pass before plunging into thornier debates over Social Security and spending bills.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has set aside this week to debate the bill. "I would like to … move to bankruptcy if at all possible. We got very, very close last year," Frist said this month.

The proposed law would make it more difficult for Americans, especially wealthy ones, to have their debts erased by filing for bankruptcy. The bill has been a priority for banks and credit card companies since 1998, when it started to wend its way through Capitol Hill.

"It's not unusual for bills to get logjammed, but this bill has been the most unlucky," said Ed Yingling, executive vice president of the American Bankers Assn., the major lobbying group for banks and credit card companies. "It has always seemed to have gotten caught up in some other fight."

Congress responded to concerns about a surge in the number of people filing for bankruptcy in the 1990s — and thereby escaping their debts — by passing a bill in 2000 designed to stem the trend. But President Clinton refused to sign it, agreeing with critics who said the measure would create hardships for lower-income consumers while doing little to slow the proliferation of credit cards that they said enticed people to assume more debt than they should.

The financial sector geared up again, and shortly after President Bush took office in 2001 the House and Senate passed competing versions of the bill.

One difference was that the Senate's measure included an amendment targeting abortion protesters. That came about partly because of Terry's outspokenness, but also because of reports that other antiabortion activists were deliberately divesting themselves of assets before taking part in illegal protests.

The reports riled abortion rights supporters, notably Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). He drafted the amendment to the Senate's bankruptcy bill that specifically would prevent abortion opponents from using the bankruptcy code to escape paying court fines.

"This is an abuse of bankruptcy law, just as somebody who gambles and wants to go into [bankruptcy] and doesn't pay his or her debts is an abuse of the bankruptcy law," Schumer said. "It's not pro-choice or pro-life or anti-choice or anti-life. It's very simply pro-rule of law."

In the summer and early fall of 2002, senators and House members spent weeks in tense negotiations and produced a compromise version of the bill that did not specifically mention antiabortion protesters, but would have blocked those facing fines for obstructing access to "lawful goods or services" from using a bankruptcy filing to duck such penalties.

Much to the delight of a bevy of high-powered lobbyists, the bankruptcy measure seemed destined to pass as Congress wrapped up its session in mid-November 2002.

But the compromise didn't hold. Some labor unions and civil rights groups that traditionally supported Democrats complained that the language was too broad. More significantly, a core of House Republicans balked, arguing that the protest provision was aimed at abortion opponents.

The impasse killed the bill, and efforts to revive it in 2003 got nowhere, stymied again by the abortion issue.

Under the proposed law, anyone making more than the median annual income in his or her state would automatically have to file under Chapter 13 of the bankruptcy code, which requires debtors to come up with a repayment plan. Only those with fewer assets could file under the more lenient Chapter 7, which permits debtors to escape all debts and start over with a clean slate.

In California, the median household income is about $50,000.

To qualify for Chapter 7, debtors would have to pass a "means test" to determine whether they had enough assets to pay back at least some of what they owed.

Some Democrats argue that the test would put an undue burden on lower-income consumers, especially those who are overwhelmed with medical bills and other misfortunes.

"If it's enacted, millions of hard-working, hard-pressed Americans will face even greater hardships so that credit card companies and banks can record even greater profits," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said.

Much of the debate on the bill will focus on such arguments. Also likely to come under scrutiny are laws in some states — notably Florida — that allow debtors to keep their homes instead of selling them to pay creditors.

Such laws were spotlighted when O.J. Simpson bought a house in Florida and avoided paying $33 million in civil damages to the family of Ron Goldman, for whose death he was found liable along with that of Simpson's former wife.

But looming as the most formidable obstacle to the bill is the abortion-related dispute.

Schumer has said he intends to offer a version of his amendment again. Republicans in both houses of Congress call it a "poison pill" for a piece of legislation that otherwise would pass easily.

"There's been one hurdle, and it's been called the Schumer amendment," Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told reporters recently. "If the Senate passes a bankruptcy bill without the Schumer amendment, I am certain that a bankruptcy bill can be law fairly quickly."

Schumer has hinted that if necessary, he would filibuster the bill.

"I will do my best to hold this bill up in every way until this amendment is supported," Schumer told Judiciary Committee colleagues this month.

In recent days, Schumer earned a small nod from one crucial Republican, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.). Specter said he supported the principle of the amendment, but was not convinced a special provision was needed.

"I don't think there ought to be [debt forgiveness] if someone has blocked an abortion clinic and caused damage, injury, perhaps even fatalities as a result of that blocking," Specter said. "The issue comes down to whether it is necessary, whether a bill without the Schumer amendment accomplishes the same result."

In 2002, some prominent abortion opponents, such as Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), agreed to the compromise language that did not single out antiabortion protesters. And at least one senior Republican aide said a similar compromise was not out of the question now.

"We're open to that, but we're not locked into it," said the aide, who requested anonymity.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), remains worried about the fate of a measure in the works for nearly a decade.

"When I started working on this issue, it was considered a scandal that bankruptcies might reach 1.4 million," Grassley said. "Guess what? In 2004, there were 1.6 million. Congress has wasted time and we still have a bankruptcy crisis on our hands."

Yingling of the American Bankers Assn. said "we've always had plenty of votes" to pass the bill's main provisions. "It's always been a matter of whether there's an amendment that kills it."

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Bush plan fuels GOP insecurity

chicagotribune.com

Bush plan fuels GOP insecurity
Some fear backlash over proposals to alter Social Security


By Jill Zuckman
Tribune national correspondent

February 26, 2005

PAYSON, Ariz. -- Rick Renzi, the Republican congressman from northern Arizona, is torn.

President Bush has urged Republicans to convince voters that his plan for personal retirement accounts will help save Social Security, but Renzi is not so sure. So rather than proselytize, Renzi has come to the Rim Country Chamber of Commerce offering coffee, cookies and a willing ear.

"I really want to understand your heart on this issue," he tells about 40 people crammed into the lobby on a weekday morning. "It's an issue I'm open to--I'm not set on."

For Renzi and a clutch of other House Republicans, Bush's decision to take on such a politically delicate subject could come with a cost: their re-election.

Midterm elections, such as those coming up in 2006, are a tough time for the party that controls the White House, usually resulting in a loss of congressional seats. In addition, Bush is in his second term, another factor that historically has hurt members of the president's party at the polls.

"With the possible exception of the war in Iraq, Social Security is likely to be the most salient issue of the cycle," said Democratic strategist Jim Jordan. "And it just may be that President Bush is leading his party over a cliff."

As a relatively new congressman in a district with many traditional Democrats, including elderly voters and American Indians, Renzi is on a short list of lawmakers targeted by Democrats and courted by the White House.

He and 13 other vulnerable House Republicans were summoned to the White House recently to talk about the issue with Bush and his senior adviser Karl Rove.

"It's like being called to the principal's office," Renzi joked with the mostly older crowd at the Chamber of Commerce meeting Tuesday before proudly sprinkling his answers to their questions with tidbits from the meeting.

Both sides in the debate agree that as the Baby Boom generation retires, Social Security will become insolvent. How to shore up the New Deal-era retirement program is where Republicans and Democrats generally part ways. Bush would let people divert a portion of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts, but critics say that would undermine the traditional retirement program.

Many other proposals have been floated for strengthening Social Security. Some want to increase payroll taxes, or raise the current $90,000 cap on income that is taxed for Social Security. Others would stop tying benefit increases to wages, which rise relatively quickly; instead, they would tie benefits to consumer prices, which rise more slowly.

Still others have suggested raising the retirement age--or even cutting back on Social Security benefits for those who are wealthier.

At Renzi's meeting, unlike other town hall sessions on Social Security that Republicans held around the country this week, there was no booing or shouting or threatening tirades. A volunteer from AARP took notes and politely reminded Renzi that "Social Security is a retirement plan and a family protection plan. It is not an investment plan."

A couple of hundred miles away, Renzi's colleague, Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), delivered a PowerPoint presentation Thursday night to a packed auditorium in Phoenix. As he laid out the long-term demographic problems for Social Security and expressed his support for private accounts, Shadegg encountered scattered heckling, boos and hisses.

Others back savings

But unlike Renzi, Shadegg's seat is secure. He was just re-elected with 80 percent of the vote after 10 years on Capitol Hill. Though he calls Social Security legislation "the biggest lift" of any issue he has encountered in Congress--meaning that getting it through will be hard to do--he believes voters will ultimately prove understanding.

"Nobody can get mad at you for saying, `We should deal with these facts,'" Shadegg said.

At the Chamber of Commerce, Renzi's constituents--several of whom voiced support for private accounts--peppered him with questions: Did he favor lifting the cap on the amount of income subject to the Social Security tax? Whatever happened to spending discipline in Washington? Could young people be trusted to invest their dollars wisely?

Although he told the AARP, the advocacy group for people 50 and older, that he opposed private accounts under Social Security in a 2004 questionnaire, the congressman clearly is intrigued by the idea. He calls the current system "a 1930s Model T," and he says he likes the idea of giving people control over their money.

"Those people who believe that there is no problem, I believe, are acting shortsighted and are acting politically," said Renzi, 46, an entrepreneur and father of 12 who is just beginning his second term.

Still, Renzi and others in Congress have drawn so many lines in the sand that it's hard to see how a bill could be written to satisfy a majority of Republicans, let alone any Democrats.

Line in the sand

For example, he won't vote for a measure that raises the retirement age and won't support cutting or recalculating benefits. He is leery of lifting the cap that limits Social Security taxes to the first $90,000 in income.

When Dick Morrison, a lumber company salesman, asked Renzi to vote against private accounts and consider increasing Social Security taxes instead, the congressman looked shocked. "Wow," he said, making it clear that raising taxes is a non-starter for him.

A recent Arizona State University poll found that 51 percent of state residents opposed private accounts, with 36 percent supporting the idea and the remainder holding no opinion.

"The older a person is, the more likely they are to oppose privatization of Social Security or messing with it," said pollster Bruce Merrill, noting that the high concentration of retirees in Arizona holds a disproportionate sway over their elected officials.

Indeed, Payson is a picturesque haven for retirees, and Renzi's rural district has more senior citizens per capita than either Phoenix or Tucson. It also is larger geographically than the state of Illinois and has the largest American Indian population of any congressional district in the nation.

Wes Gullett, a Republican strategist in Phoenix, is skeptical that voters truly are frightened by the prospect of change or by the possibility that anything ultimately will happen.

"There's not a lot of belief that Social Security is going to get tackled," he said.

For his part, Renzi is giving as many voters in his district the chance to talk to him about Social Security as he can. He's planning to hold at least 20 more coffees by the end of March.

And if a voter has a worry, then most likely Renzi shares it. For example, he's nervous that a market downturn could leave those who opt for private accounts in the lurch. And his brow furrows at the notion of borrowing a trillion or more dollars to create personal accounts and shore up the current system.

"I think you can see that I'm torn here," he tells a voter who asks his position on borrowing money to pay for the president's proposal. "It's kind of like I'm looking for permission."

If there is a constant refrain from Renzi, it's that he is "keeping his powder dry," something that Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has admonished House members to do for weeks.

"Until we get the specifics of a plan together, you're going to see a lot of House Republicans taking the middle of the road," said Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

After an hour of talk as the rain let loose outside, Renzi said he believed that the people with the open minds are the voters. But he said Congress cannot move forward unless Republicans work with Senate Democrats, who have enough votes to sink any plan, to forge a compromise.

Whatever stand he ultimately takes, Renzi said he knows Democrats are "going to come after me."

Tide of criticism

One independent group already has flooded Renzi's district with phone calls, urging voters to tell him to vote against personal accounts. And the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has questioned why he told the AARP he does not support private accounts after telling the National Taxpayers Union two years earlier that he would vote for them.

"We're going to remind everyone," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic group. "You can't have it both ways on this one."

Renzi shrugs off the criticism as he continues to sort through the issue.

"I'll be OK," he insisted. "I'll be able to stand up and speak from my heart, which will carry me even in a tough election if [the bill is] sound and has content and merit to it and substance. If it's fluff and smoke and mirrors, it's not going to sell."

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Adware maker joins federal privacy board

CNET News.com
Adware maker joins federal privacy board

By Declan McCullagh
http://news.com.com/Adware+maker+joins+federal+privacy+board/2100-1028_3-5587653.html

The Department of Homeland Security has named Claria, an adware maker that online publishers once dubbed a "parasite," to a federal privacy advisory board.

An executive from Claria, formerly called Gator, will be one of 20 members of the committee, the department said Wednesday.

"This committee will provide the department with important recommendations on how to further the department's mission while protecting the privacy of personally identifiable information of citizens and visitors of the United States," Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the department's chief privacy officer, said in a statement.

Claria bundles its pop-up advertising software with ad-supported networks such as Kazaa. Recently, the privately held company has been trying to seek credibility by following stricter privacy guidelines and offering behavioral profiling services to its partners.
In an e-mail message to CNET News.com, Kelly defended the inclusion of a Claria representative on the committee. "I am proud of, supportive of and grateful for those individuals in the public and private sector who are willing to take on the hard tasks, fight the good fight, and who surprise us with creative, fresh and unconventional thinking, and who make change where change is needed through their hard work and personal dedication," Kelly said.

In the past, Claria's pop-up ad software has riled some users who claimed it was annoying, installed without permission, and not easy to delete. Publishers also were irked about pop-up ads for a rival's product appearing next to their own Web sites. Catalog retailer L.L. Bean sued Gator for alleged trademark infringement.

Claria's representative on the Homeland Security privacy board is company Vice President D. Reed Freeman, a former Federal Trade Commission staff attorney. Other members include executives from Intel, Computer Associates International, IBM, Oracle and the Cato Institute.
Kelly said Freeman will "bring his courage and conviction to the board, and will contribute productively--and constructively--to the board's and the public's dialogue on privacy and homeland security."

The committee is tasked with providing "external expert advice to the secretary and the chief privacy officer on programmatic, policy, operational and technological issues that affect privacy, data integrity and data interoperability."

In February 2003, Gator settled a high-profile case brought by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Dow Jones and other media companies. Terms of that deal were quiet, but Claria appears to have stopped delivering pop-ups to those publishers' sites.

Claria did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CNET News.com's Stefanie Olsen contributed to this report.

Story last modified Wed Feb 23 17:19:00 PST 2005

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Hollywood Bets on Chris Rock's 'Indecency'

The New York Times
February 27, 2005
FRANK RICH
Hollywood Bets on Chris Rock's 'Indecency'

THE total box office for all five best-picture nominees on Sunday's Oscars is so small that their collective niche in the national cultural marketplace falls somewhere between square dancing and non-Grisham fiction. But if this year's Oscars are worthless as a barometer of the broad state of American pop culture, there's much to learn from the hype spun by ABC and the motion picture academy to seduce Americans to watch even if they can't distinguish Clive Owen from Catalina Sandino Moreno. The selling of the Oscar show is the latest indicator of the most telling disconnect in our politics: in the post-Janet Jackson era, "indecency" is gaining in popularity in direct proportion to Washington's campaign to shut indecency down.

Hollywood can read the numbers. Once the feds vowed to smite future "wardrobe malfunctions," the customers started bolting the annual TV franchises where those malfunctions and their verbal counterparts are apt to occur. An award show sanitized of vulgarity and encased in the prophylactic of tape delay is an oxymoron. And so the Golden Globes lost 40 percent of its audience in January on NBC, the Grammys lost 28 percent of its audience this month on CBS. The viewers turned up instead at the competing "Desperate Housewives" on ABC, where S-and-M is the latest item on the carnal menu. Though this year's Super Bowl didn't have to go up against that runaway hit, its born-again family-friendliness also took a ratings toll; the audience in the all-important 18-to-49 demographic fell to an all-time low. The viewers perked up only for a GoDaddy.com commercial parodying a Washington "Broadcast Censorship Hearing": TiVo reported that the spot's utterly unrevealing "wardrobe malfunction" gag was the most replayed moment from any of the game's ads, much as the Jackson-Timberlake pas de deux that inspired it was the TiVo sensation of the year before.

This is why the people bringing you the Oscars have done everything possible to imply that Sunday's show will be so indecent that even the winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award may let loose with a Dick Cheney expletive. Rather than chase away MTV and its fans from the festivities as the National Football League did after the Jackson fracas, the academy hired as its host Chris Rock, a three-time MTV Music Video Awards M.C. Mr. Rock, as brilliant at P.R. as he is at comedy, ran around giving cheeky interviews making the outrageous charge that the Oscars might have a gay following. Matt Drudge took the bait and assailed the comedian for indecency. Mr. Rock was soiling "the classiest night in Hollywood," he said on Fox News, by taking "a lewd route ... to the gutter."

The motion picture academy's marketers couldn't have said it better themselves. They know a lewd route is the yellow brick road to Nielsen nirvana. Gilbert Cates, the Oscars producer, had already been putting out the message that he opposed the show's tape delay as "dangerous to society." The academy's executive director, Bruce Davis, elaborated to Lola Ogunnaike of The New York Times: "I like to hear that people are nervous, because that means you're more likely to watch." Last Sunday Mr. Rock was billed by Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes" as a "nontraditional host" who is "not afraid to offend" and whose "comedy is still as profane and uncut as ever." Two hours later came the pièce de résistance: Mr. Rock in an Oscar-show promo spot on "Desperate Housewives" fondling the Oscar statuette (in all its gold nudity) and declaring, "You won't believe the halftime show!"

It's all a hoax, of course. ABC has merely shortened last year's seven-second tape delay to five seconds, and viewers already annoyed that the Oscar telecast is pre-empting "Desperate Housewives" may have further reason to complain when they learn that any profane comedy or liberated cleavage will be seen only by the swells at the Kodak Theater. Next year may be another story. In a little noted report in Variety earlier this month, the academy got ABC to forgo a contract stipulation requiring a tape delay in future Oscar shows. Further ratings tumbles ensure that the war against tape delays will be taken up in earnest by media giants eager to preserve their profit centers. Already the networks are mulling a court challenge to the constitutionality of the decades-old Federal Communications Commission decency standards. The rules are so loosey-goosy it's hard to imagine how the networks could lose.

The signs are everywhere that the indecency campaign is failing anyway in the months since "moral values" supposedly became the unofficial law of the land. To see how much so, forget about the liberal Hollywood of Oscar night and examine instead the porn peddlers of the right.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox, always a leader in these hypocrisy sweepstakes, made pious hay out of yanking the second scheduled broadcast of the GoDaddy.com commercial after its initial Super Bowl appearance. But Fox Sports promptly plastered the "GoDaddy girl" alongside Playboy bunnies and other pinups on its "Funhouse Fox of the Week" Web site, where every adolescent teenager could ogle it to his libido's content. No less a bellwether is the decision of Adelphia, a cable giant known for its refusal to traffic in erotica, to change its image radically now that its moralistic founder and former C.E.O., John Rigas, has been convicted of looting the company. Shortly after President Bush's inauguration Adelphia acknowledged that it is offering XXX, the most hard-core porn, to some subscribers - a cable first, outdoing even the XX porn on Mr. Murdoch's DirecTV in explicitness. "The more X's, the more popular," an Adelphia spokeswoman told The Los Angeles Times.

As Jake Tapper reported on ABC News, Adelphia is a big Republican contributor. Its beneficiaries include Rick Santorum, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has likened homosexuality to "man on dog" sex, a specialty item that his campaign donor might yet present some day. Sift through the Center for Responsive Politics' campaign contribution site, and you will also find that Fred Upton, the Republican point man in the Congressional indecency crusade, is one of the many in his party (President Bush among them) raking in contributions from Comcast or its executives. Comcast subscribers are awash in porn. In Mr. Upton's own Kalamazoo district, its pay-per-view networks have offered such hard-core fare as "Young, Fresh & Ripe" and "As Young As They Come No. 8" even as the congressman put the finishing touches on the penalty-enhanced Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005.

Cheering Mr. Upton on is the Parents Television Council, the e-mail factory that Mediaweek magazine credits with as much as 99.9 percent of all indecency complaints to the F.C.C. in 2004. It is also quite a little fount of salacious entertainment in its own right. On its Web site, the organization's tireless "entertainment analysts" compile a list of every naughty word used on television and invite visitors to "Watch the Worst TV Clip of the Week." An archive of past clips - helpfully labeled individually by sin ("gratuitous teen sex," "necrophilia") - is there for your pleasure, with no requirement for the credit card number or membership fee that porn Internet sites use as a roadblock for children.

That politicians and public scolds like these have succeeded in the temporary laundering of live TV shows, and even "Saving Private Ryan," is a symptom of the political moment. It won't last long. The power of the free market, for better or worse, will prevail, and the market tells us that it is still the American way to lament indecency even while gobbling it up. This is the year that Sports Illustrated for the first time published the number for its subscribers to phone if they wanted to skip the swimsuit issue - and almost no one called. Sandra Dee really is dead, and no fire-and-brimstone speeches by James Dobson are going to bring her back.

But that does not mean that the indecency campaign is benign. Even if it barely slows the entertainment industry juggernaut, it inflicts collateral damage elsewhere - whether casting a chill over broadcast news or crippling public broadcasting by inducing it to censor even the language of American troops in a "Frontline" documentary about Iraq. The Parents Television Council may purport to complain about "The Simpsons," which last Sunday presented an episode both sympathetic to same-sex marriage and skeptical of a Bible-thumping minister. ("If you love the Bible so much," Homer asks him, "why don't you marry it?") But that's a game; this organization knows full well it can't lay a finger on Fox or its well-connected proprietor, Mr. Murdoch. The same anti-indecency forces, however, can and did set the stage for the new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, to go gunning for a far milder evocation of same-sex parents in the children's show "Postcards From Buster" on PBS.

Fresh from sending a cartoon rabbit to the slaughterhouse, Ms. Spellings will figure out ways to discriminate against real-life lesbian moms in other departmental policies that have nothing to do with entertainment. And she's not the only administration official empowered by the decency crusaders to apply censorship to public policy well removed from the TV screen. No sooner were PBS's lesbians sent to the indecency gulag than The Washington Post reported that the Department of Health and Human Services had instructed the presenters of a federally funded conference on suicide prevention this month to remove the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual" and "transgender" from the name of a talk heretofore titled "Suicide Prevention Among Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals," thereby rendering it invisible and useless.

At least President Bush is now on tape saying he won't "kick gays." He leaves that to surrogates. It's gay people and teenagers being denied potentially life-saving sex education who ultimately are the real victims of the larger agenda of the decency crusaders, which is not to clean up show business, a doomed mission, but to realize the more attainable goal of enlisting the government to marginalize and punish those who don't adhere to their "moral values." For its part, show business will have no problem fending for itself. My favorite moment in the whole faux Oscar controversy came on a "Today" show segment weighing the Drudge Report blast of Chris Rock. "Still ahead this morning on 'Today,' " said Katie Couric without missing a beat as that report ended, "former teacher Mary Kay Letourneau is planning to marry the student who fathered two of her children." America just can't stop itself from staying tuned.

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Another Bush Press Conference

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How Bush Could Make Gas 86 Cents A Gallon

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Press Credentials

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Truth Twisting

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And Then One Day . . .

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W.'s Stiletto Democracy

The New York Times
February 27, 2005

W.'s Stiletto Democracy
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It was remarkable to see President Bush lecture Vladimir Putin on the importance of checks and balances in a democratic society.

Remarkably brazen, given that the only checks Mr. Bush seems to believe in are those written to the "journalists" Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Karen Ryan, the fake TV anchor, to help promote his policies. The administration has given a whole new meaning to checkbook journalism, paying a stupendous $97 million to an outside P.R. firm to buy columnists and produce propaganda, including faux video news releases.

The only balance W. likes is the slavering, Pravda-like "Fair and Balanced" coverage Fox News provides. Mr. Bush pledges to spread democracy while his officials strive to create a Potemkin press village at home. This White House seems to prefer softball questions from a self-advertised male escort with a fake name to hardball questions from journalists with real names; it prefers tossing journalists who protect their sources into the gulag to giving up the officials who broke the law by leaking the name of their own C.I.A. agent.

W., who once looked into Mr. Putin's soul and liked what he saw, did not demand the end of tyranny, as he did in his second Inaugural Address. His upper lip sweating a bit, he did not rise to the level of his hero Ronald Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Instead, he said that "the common ground is a lot more than those areas where we disagree." The Russians were happy to stress the common ground as well.

An irritated Mr. Putin compared the Russian system to the American Electoral College, perhaps reminding the man preaching to him about democracy that he had come in second in 2000 according to the popular vote, the standard most democracies use.

Certainly the autocratic former K.G.B. agent needs to be upbraided by someone - Tony Blair, maybe? - for eviscerating the meager steps toward democracy that Russia had made before Mr. Putin came to power. But Mr. Bush is on shaky ground if he wants to hold up his administration as a paragon of safeguarding liberty - considering it has trampled civil liberties in the name of the war on terror and outsourced the torture of prisoners to bastions of democracy like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (The secretary of state canceled a trip to Egypt this week after Egypt's arrest of a leading opposition politician.)

"I live in a transparent country," Mr. Bush protested to a Russian reporter who implicitly criticized the Patriot Act by noting that the private lives of American citizens "are now being monitored by the state."

Dick Cheney's secret meetings with energy lobbyists were certainly a model of transparency. As was the buildup to the Iraq war, when the Bush hawks did their best to cloak the real reasons they wanted to go to war and trumpet the trumped-up reasons.

The Bush administration wields maximum secrecy with minimal opposition. The White House press is timid. The poor, limp Democrats don't have enough power to convene Congressional hearings on any Republican outrages and are reduced to writing whining letters of protest that are tossed in the Oval Office trash.

When nearly $9 billion allotted for Iraqi reconstruction during Paul Bremer's tenure went up in smoke, Democratic lawmakers vainly pleaded with Republicans to open a Congressional investigation.

Even the near absence of checks and balances is not enough for W. Not content with controlling the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and a good chunk of the Fourth Estate, he goes to even more ludicrous lengths to avoid being challenged.

The White House wants its Republican allies in the Senate to stamp out the filibuster, one of the few weapons the handcuffed Democrats have left. They want to invoke the so-called nuclear option and get rid of the 150-year-old tradition in order to ram through more right-wing judges.

Mr. Bush and Condi Rice strut in their speeches - the secretary of state also strutted in Wiesbaden in her foxy "Matrix"-dominatrix black leather stiletto boots - but they shy away from taking questions from the public unless they get to vet the questions and audiences in advance.

Administration officials went so far as to cancel a town hall meeting during Mr. Bush's visit to Germany last week after deciding an unscripted setting would be too risky, opting for a round-table talk in Mainz with preselected Germans and Americans.

The president loves democracy - as long as democracy means he's always right.

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The Tipping Points

The New York Times
February 27, 2005

The Tipping Points
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The other night on ABC's "Nightline," the host, Ted Koppel, posed an intriguing question to Malcolm Gladwell, the social scientist who wrote the path-breaking book "The Tipping Point," which is about how changes in behavior or perception can reach a critical mass and then suddenly create a whole new reality. Mr. Koppel asked: Can you know you are in the middle of a tipping point, or is it only something you can see in retrospect?

Mr. Gladwell responded that "the most important thing in trying to analyze whether something is at the verge of a tipping point, is whether it - an event - causes people to reframe an issue. ...A dumb example is the Atkins's diet, which reframes dieting from thinking about it in terms of avoiding calories and fat to thinking about it as avoiding carbohydrates, which really changes the way people perceive dieting."

Mr. Koppel was raising the question because he wanted to explore whether the Iraqi elections marked a tipping point in history. I was on the same show, and in mulling over this question more I think that what's so interesting about the Middle East today is that we're actually witnessing three tipping points at once.

Thanks to eight million Iraqis defying "you vote, you die" terrorist threats, Iraq has been reframed from a story about Iraqi "insurgents" trying to liberate their country from American occupiers and their Iraqi "stooges" to a story of the overwhelming Iraqi majority trying to build a democracy, with U.S. help, against the wishes of Iraqi Baathist-fascists and jihadists.

In Lebanon, the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which Syria is widely suspected of having had a hand in, has reframed that drama. A month ago, Lebanon was the story of a tiny Christian minority trying to resist the Syrian occupation, which had the tacit support of the pro-Syrian Lebanese government and a cadre of Lebanese politicians who had sold their souls to Damascus. After the Hariri murder, Lebanese just snapped. Lebanon became the story of a broad majority of Lebanese Christians, Muslims and Druse no longer willing to remain silent, but instead telling the Syrians, and their Lebanese puppet president, to "go home." Lebanon went from a country where few dared whisper "When will Syria leave?" to a country where nearly everyone was shouting it, and Syria was having to answer.

The Israel-Palestine drama has gone from how Ariel Sharon will use any means possible to sustain Israel's hold on Gaza, which he once said was indispensable for the security of the Jewish state, to being about how Mr. Sharon will use any means possible to evacuate Gaza - with its huge Palestinian population - which he now says is necessary for saving Israel as a Jewish state. The issue for the Palestinians is no longer about how they resist the Israeli occupation in Gaza, but whether they build a decent mini-state there - a Dubai on the Mediterranean. Because if they do, it will fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank.

While all three of these situations would constitute tipping points by Mr. Gladwell's definition, I would feel a lot better about all three if I thought that they were irreversible - and couldn't tip back the wrong way.

For Iraq to be tipped in the right direction, it was necessary to have the election we did, but that was not sufficient. The sufficient thing is that a stable, decent Iraqi government emerge that can also quell the Sunni insurgency. That will depend in part on America's willingness to stay the course in Iraq. It will depend in part on the Shiite majority's willingness to share power with the Sunnis - particularly one of the crucial cabinet portfolios of defense, intelligence or interior - and not go on a de-Baathification rampage. And it will depend in part on the Sunni Arab leaders finally supporting the Iraqi majority.

For Lebanon to liberate itself from Syria, the Lebanese opposition groups will have to find a way to translate their aspirations into a withdrawal deal with Damascus. The Syrians will not be pushed out. And for Israelis and Palestinians to really tip toward peace, the moderates on both sides are really going to have to help each other succeed.

Indeed, in the Middle East playground - as Friday's suicide bomb in Israel reminds us - tipping points are sometimes more like teeter-totters: one moment you're riding high and the next minute you're slammed to the ground. Nevertheless, what's happened in the last four weeks is not just important, it's remarkable. And if we can keep all three tipping points tipped, it will be incredible.

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Thousands Died in Africa Yesterday

The New York Times
February 27, 2005

Thousands Died in Africa Yesterday

When a once-in-a-century natural disaster swept away the lives of more than 100,000 poor Asians last December, the developed world opened its hearts and its checkbooks. Yet when it comes to Africa, where hundreds of thousands of poor men, women and children die needlessly each year from preventable diseases, or unnatural disasters like civil wars, much of the developed world seems to have a heart of stone.
•

Not every African state is failing. Most are not. But the continent's most troubled regions - including Somalia and Sudan in the east, Congo in the center, Zimbabwe in the south and Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone in the west - challenge not only our common humanity, but global security as well. The lethal combination of corrupt or destructive leaders, porous and unmonitored borders and rootless or hopeless young men has made some of these regions incubators of international terrorism and contagious diseases like AIDS. Others are sanctuaries for swindlers and drug traffickers whose victims can be found throughout the world.

In many of these places, poverty and unemployment and the desperation they spawn leave young men vulnerable to the lure of terrorist organizations, which, beyond offering two meals a day, also provide a target to vent their anger at rich societies, which they are led to believe view them with condescension and treat them with contempt. Training camps for Islamic extremists are now thought to be sprouting like anthills on the savanna.

"America is committed not only to the campaign against terrorism in a military sense, but the campaign against poverty, the campaign against illiteracy and ignorance." Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said that. Well, America launched its war on terror after Sept. 11, but did not bother to look at some of the deeper causes of global instability. This country is going to spend more than $400 billion on the military this year, and another $100 billion or so for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But that amount is never going to buy Americans peace if the government continues to spend an anemic $16 billion - the Pentagon budget is 25 times that size - in foreign aid that addresses the plight of the poorest of the world's poor.
•

For decades, most Americans either have preferred not to hear about these problems, or, blanching at the scope of the human tragedy, have thrown up their hands. But in terms of the kind of money the West thinks nothing of spending, on such things as sports and entertainment extravaganzas, not to speak of defense budgets, meeting many of Africa's most urgent needs seems shockingly affordable. What has been missing is the political will.

This year, there is a real chance of scrounging up, and then mobilizing, this political will. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who has stood resolutely by President Bush at Mr. Blair's own political peril through the war in Iraq, has staked Britain's presidency of the Group of 8 industrial nations this year on tackling poverty in Africa. Mr. Blair wants his ally, Mr. Bush, to stand beside him at the coming G-8 summit meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland this July. After the G-8 meeting there will be a United Nations summit meeting in New York in September, where the world's leaders will examine progress made toward reaching the Millennium Development Goals of cutting global poverty in half by 2015. Chief among those goals was that developed countries like America, Britain and France would work toward giving 0.7 percent of their national incomes for development aid for poor countries.

If the progress made so far is any guide, it is going to be a short meeting. While Britain is about halfway to the goal, at 0.34 percent, and France is at 0.41 percent, America remains near rock bottom, at 0.18 percent. Undoubtedly, President Bush will point to his Millennium Challenge Account when he attends the summit meeting. He will be correct in saying that his administration has given more annually in foreign aid than the Clinton administration in sheer dollars. His Millennium Challenge Account was supposed to increase United States assistance to poor countries that are committed to policies promoting development. This is a worthy endeavor, but it has three big problems.
•

First, neither the administration nor Congress has come anywhere close to financing the program fully. Second, the program, announced back in 2002, has yet to disburse a single dollar.

Most important, relying mostly on programs like the Millennium Challenge Account, which tie foreign aid to good governance, condemns millions of Africans who have dreadful governments (Liberia, Congo, Ivory Coast) or no government (Somalia) to die. No donor nation is, or should be, willing to direct money to despotic, thieving or incompetent governments likely to misspend it or divert it to the personal bank accounts of their leaders. Strict international criteria of political accountability, financial transparency and development-friendly social and economic policies need to be established and enforced, not just by outside donors but by prominent and influential African leaders, like South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki.

Help for people living under governments that fail these criteria will have to be channeled mainly through international and nongovernmental organizations. Bypassed governments will not like this, but they cannot be allowed to stand in the way of outside help to the victims of their misrule. It is not the fault of Africa's millions of refugees that warring armies have burned their villages and fields and driven them into unsafe and disease-ridden camps, like those in the Darfur region of Sudan. And no fair-minded person would blame the victims of callous and destructive governments, like Zimbabwe's, for the economic and social misery they create.

In the next few months, Mr. Bush could take a giant step towards altering the way the world views America by joining Mr. Blair in pushing for more help in Africa. It's past time; the continent is dying. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is anything but, some 1,000 people die every day of preventable diseases like malaria and diarrhea. That's the equivalent of a tsunami every five months, in that one country alone. Throughout the continent of Africa, thousands of people die needlessly every day from diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
•

One hundred years ago, before we had the medical know-how to eradicate these illnesses, this might have been acceptable. But we are the first generation able to afford to end poverty and the diseases it spawns. It's past time we step up to the plate. We are all responsible for choosing to view the tsunami victims in Southeast Asia as more deserving of our help than the malaria victims in Africa. Jeffrey Sachs, the economist who heads the United Nations' Millennium Development Project to end global poverty, rightly takes issue with the press in his book "The End of Poverty": "Every morning," Mr. Sachs writes, "our newspapers could report, 'More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty.' "

So, on this page, we'd [The New York Times] like to make a first step.

Yesterday, more than 20,000 people perished of extreme poverty.

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Stealthy Budget Cuts

washingtonpost.com
Stealthy Budget Cuts

By David S. Broder

Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page B07

Back-to-back briefings last week put a harsh spotlight on the deep hole left by the budget policies of George Bush's first term. Millions of Americans will be paying the price for the fiscal profligacy of this misnamed conservative government.

The bad news, delivered in the first report, is that the camouflaged domestic spending cuts contained in the Bush budget will -- if accepted by Congress -- do serious damage to education initiatives, low-income assistance and environmental programs over the next five years.

The worse news, documented in the second report, is that these cuts will not even begin to deal with the looming calamity of runaway entitlement spending on the retirement and health care costs of the baby boom generation.

You won't find either of these warnings spelled out in the budget message of the president. An analysis by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted that for the first time since at least 1989 the White House Office of Management and Budget failed to give Congress or the news media information on the proposed spending on most domestic programs beyond the coming year.

These "domestic discretionary" programs -- covering all the routine functions of government except for defense, homeland security and international affairs, and the entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare -- span the gamut from national parks to medical research.

They are financed by annual appropriations from Congress. Bush gave detailed directions on how he wants $18 billion saved on these programs next year, but he then urged Congress to impose spending caps for the next five years that would reduce spending in these areas by $214 billion total -- without specifying the cuts. Savings in all cases are measured against fiscal 2005 spending on these programs, adjusted only for inflation.

By studying the spending caps Bush proposed for the 57 broad functions included in the domestic discretionary budget, the center's experts calculated how much would have to come out of individual programs -- assuming Congress accepts Bush's priorities.

The results are startling. Elementary and secondary education programs, including the president's No Child Left Behind initiative, would be cut by $11.5 billion over the next five years, with a 12 percent reduction from inflation-adjusted 2005 levels in fiscal 2010 alone.

The WIC program, which subsidizes the diets of low-income pregnant women and nursing mothers -- a major preventative against low-weight babies -- would be cut by $658 million, enough to reduce coverage in 2010 by 660,000 women. Head Start funds would be reduced $3.3 billion over five years, with 118,000 fewer youngsters enrolled in 2010.

Clean water and clean air funding would decline by $6.4 billion over five years, a 20 percent cut in 2010. Community development programs used by cities to build up impoverished neighborhoods would lose $9.2 billion in five years, a 36 percent cut in 2010.

Most of these cuts would come out of state and local budgets, adding to the burdens their taxpayers would have to take up if services are to be maintained.

As Bob Greenstein, the center's director, commented, cuts of this magnitude would be bitterly contested if Congress had to justify them to the people who care about each of these programs. But by asking instead for a vote this year on enforceable five-year caps on these broad categories of spending, the administration hopes to accomplish its goals without arousing the same degree of controversy.

The irony is that even if all this were done, the biggest budget problem would still remain. Medicare and Social Security benefits for the huge wave of boomers, who start to turn 62 in just three years, make the cur- rent budget policies "unsustainable" for the long term. That was the word used repeatedly at a briefing by David Walker, the head of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, and others.

Reform of these major entitlement programs is the pressing need to avoid a budget train wreck in the next generation, but Bush has offered little leadership on that. His Social Security plan -- for individual savings accounts -- does nothing to address the shortfall in that system. And his "contribution" to solving the more pressing crisis in Medicare has been to add an unaffordable prescription drug benefit to the program.

It is a sorry record for a conservative administration, and we are just beginning to recognize its price.

davidbroder@washpost.com

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Deadly Ignorance

washingtonpost.com
Deadly Ignorance

Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page B06

THE BUSH administration is quietly extending a policy that undermines the global battle against AIDS. It is being pushed in this direction by Congress, notably by Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.). But some administration officials zealously defend this policy error, claiming scientific evidence that doesn't exist.

The administration's error is to oppose the distribution of uncontaminated needles to drug addicts. A large body of scientific evidence suggests that the free provision of clean needles curbs the spread of AIDS among drug users without increasing rates of addiction. Given that addicts are at the center of many of the AIDS epidemics in Eastern Europe and Asia, ignoring this science could cost millions of lives. In Russia, as of 2004, 80 percent of all HIV cases involved drug injectors, and many of these infections occurred because addicts share contaminated needles. In Malaysia, China, Vietnam and Ukraine, drug injectors also account for more than half of all HIV cases. Once a critical mass of drug users carries the virus, the epidemic spreads via unprotected sex to non-drug users.

The administration claims that the evidence for the effectiveness of needle exchange is shaky. An official who requested anonymity directed us to a number of researchers who have allegedly cast doubt on the pro-exchange consensus. One of them is Steffanie A. Strathdee of the University of California at San Diego; when we contacted her, she responded that her research "supports the expansion of needle exchange programs, not the opposite." Another researcher cited by the administration is Martin T. Schechter of the University of British Columbia; he wrote us that "Our research here in Vancouver has been repeatedly used to cast doubt on needle exchange programs. I believe this is a clear misinterpretation of the facts." Yet a third researcher cited by the administration is Julie Bruneau at the University of Montreal; she told us that "in the vast majority of cases needle exchange programs drive HIV incidence lower." We asked Dr. Bruneau whether she favored needle exchanges in countries such as Russia or Thailand. "Yes, sure," she responded.

The Bush administration attempted to bolster its case by providing us with three scientific articles. One, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, was produced by an author unknown to leading experts in this field who is affiliated with a group called the Children's AIDS Fund. This group is more renowned for its ties to the Bush administration than for its public health rigor: As the Post's David Brown has reported, it recently received an administration grant despite the fact that an expert panel had deemed its application "not suitable for funding." The two other articles supplied by the administration had been published in the American Journal of Public Health. Although each raised questions about the certainty with which needle-exchange advocates state their case, neither opposed such programs.

Evidence that the administration does not cite leaves little doubt about the case for needle exchange. A study of 81 cities published in 1997 in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that in cities without needle-exchange programs, HIV infection rates among injection drug users rose by nearly 6 percent per year; by contrast, cities that had introduced free-needle programs witnessed a decrease in infection rates of about the same magnitude. Elias A. Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health, wrote last year that exchange programs "can be an effective component of a comprehensive community-based HIV prevention effort," and a World Health Organization technical paper agreed that the provision of clean needles and syringes should be "a fundamental component of any comprehensive and effective HIV-prevention programme." Addressing legitimate methodological questions about the research favoring needle exchange, the WHO reasonably concluded that incomplete scientific evidence does not confer the freedom to ignore the knowledge we do have.

Respecting science does not appear to be the administration's priority, however. Not only is it refusing to spend federal dollars on needle exchange, but the administration also is waging a campaign to persuade the United Nations to toe its misguided line. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, which is heavily reliant on U.S. funding, has been made to expunge references to needle exchange from its literature, and the administration is expected to continue its pressure on the United Nations at a meeting that starts March 7. The State Department's new leadership needs to end this bullying flat-earthism. It won't help President Bush's current effort to relaunch his image among allies. And it's almost certain to kill people.

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GOP May Seek a Deal on Accounts

washingtonpost.com
GOP May Seek a Deal on Accounts
Anxious Lawmakers Negotiate With Democrats on Social Security Changes

By John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page A01

President Bush is still in the opening phase of a campaign to sell the public and Congress on his ambitious plans for Social Security, but some Republicans on Capitol Hill have decided it is not too early to begin pondering an exit strategy.

With polls showing widespread skepticism of Bush's proposed individual investment accounts and Democratic lawmakers expressing nearly uniform opposition, some allies of the president are focused on possible split-the-difference deals.

As described in interviews, most of these compromises would involve Bush significantly scaling back his proposals for restructuring the popular benefits program. In exchange, he could still claim an incremental victory on what he has described as his core principles: enhancing the long-term solvency of Social Security and giving younger Americans options to invest more of their retirement money.

In one example, Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) said, a compromise might involve merging Bush's proposal with plans -- some backed by Democrats -- that create government-subsidized savings plans outside Social Security. Under this scenario, Bush's proposal to divert 4 percent of an individual's Social Security payroll tax would become 2 percent or less.

"The president could claim a real victory just by getting personal accounts," said Shaw, who has shared his ideas with Vice President Cheney and White House senior adviser Karl Rove. "It may be that a hybrid" is the key to compromise.

Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said that he is discussing with Democratic colleagues a compromise plan that would guarantee low-income beneficiaries will do better under a new program than the existing system, even if this increases the program's cost.

White House officials said Bush is open to such a compromise and will continue to signal this publicly in the days ahead.

But all this maneuvering assumes that Democrats are looking for compromise -- rather than the opportunity to hand Bush the kind of monumental defeat that President Bill Clinton suffered 11 years ago with his proposal to change the health care system. Clinton's signal error, most of his aides concluded in retrospect, was not dropping his plan in favor of a bipartisan deal on more modest legislation while he still had enough political leverage to bring Republicans to the table.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid has declared that Senate Democrats are united in their opposition to personal accounts carved out of Social Security. That is a deal-killer if true, since as a practical matter the most controversial ideas typically need a supermajority of 60 votes to end filibusters and allow a vote. Despite Reid's assertion, however, several moderate Democrats have not ruled out backing a more modest version of the president's plan.

Some of these centrists, such as Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), have been meeting with Republican colleagues to discuss whether there is a middle ground.

Even critics eager to read the obituary for the most ambitious version of Bush's Social Security plan acknowledge it is too early to write it. But the initial response suggests the idea is struggling.

Many anxious GOP legislators say they have received clear caution signals from constituents on trips home, and several polls reflect the headwind Bush is facing. Significantly, a recent Washington Post poll, conducted in conjunction with the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, showed that personal accounts win majority support from voters, but that support drops well below 50 percent when people learn details.

These details include the long-term cost of the change, which the White House acknowledges is in the trillions of dollars; the risk to people who choose the investment option; and the fact that personal accounts do not extend the solvency of Social Security unless they are paired with benefit cuts or tax increases in the traditional program.

Rove and other Bush aides profess confidence in the president's prospects. They say that Bush is still educating the public about his ideas, and note that most voters in polls accept his diagnosis that the Social Security system is unsustainable over the long term.

White House aides say they have studied Clinton's experience with health care -- as well as President Ronald Reagan's 1986 victory on tax reform -- in fashioning a strategy. Rove cautioned that some of the Clinton comparisons are not valid.

"The Clinton health care plan was a complicated expansion of control for the federal government, substituting the government for individual choice," Rove said. Under the Bush plan, "individuals have more control and decisions are left up to them; one is far more broadly acceptable."

Aides emphasize that Bush has purposely left himself flexibility by presenting his ideas as principles, rather than presenting detailed legislation as Clinton did during health care.

Still, deciding when and how to use this flexibility is one of the most delicate questions Bush faces. Over four years, this president usually has chosen defiance rather than difference-splitting in dealing with opponents. He has dismissed making premature concessions by saying he does not like to "negotiate with myself."

But history suggests waiting too long can be equally self-defeating. In late 1993 and early 1994, there were ample signs that Clinton's comprehensive health care plan was in trouble, but there were also many senior Republicans who said they would work with him to pass incremental reforms. Some of these measures would have been substantial -- expanding health insurance for children or providing subsidies to help more individuals buy their own insurance.

Clinton, at the urging of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, refused to yield. In the 1994 State of the Union address, he waved a pen and warned Congress that he would veto any plan that did not meet his goal of universal coverage for every American. By summer, when it become obvious that his comprehensive plan was dead, Republicans were relishing Clinton's political troubles and none was still willing to compromise. That fall, Republicans swept to control in Congress, an advantage they keep to this day.

"By the time everybody in Washington knows it's time to get out, it's too late to get out," said John D. Podesta, a former Clinton chief of staff who was among those warning against Clinton's 1994 veto threat.

Podesta, who now heads the liberal Center for American Progress, said he believes Bush faces a similar defeat, because "the more people learn about the plan, the worse it does." In addition, he said, Bush has placed a "stake in the ground" about carving individual accounts from Social Security, making any retreat from that goal an unmistakable political defeat.

Another veteran of the Clinton years, former White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, is not so sure. Although Ickes said he wishes defeat for Bush, he said he is fearful that a compromise plan may yet allow the president to turn Social Security from a program identified with Democrats to one identified with Republicans.

Democrats leaning toward compromise "need to think hard about what Bush is trying to do and what the stakes are," he said.

David Gergen, who served in Clinton's White House and in the administrations of several Republican predecessors, does not believe Democrats will ever give Bush the compromise victory Ickes is worried about.

"Why would they put their head in that noose?" he asked. As long as Republicans are opposed to any tax increases and Democrats are opposed to any benefit cuts, "I don't see a lot of wiggle room" for fashioning a bargain.

Given the poor prospects for victory, Gergen said, Bush's best option might be "a preemptive strategy that allows him to dump out of this and move toward a pathway to a new solution."

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For Bush, a Long Embrace of Social Security Plan

The New York Times
February 27, 2005
For Bush, a Long Embrace of Social Security Plan
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - The conservative economists and public policy experts who trooped in to brief George W. Bush on Social Security not long after he was re-elected governor of Texas in 1998 came with their own ideas about how to overhaul the retirement program. But they quickly found that Mr. Bush, who was well into preparations for his first presidential race and had invited them to Austin for the discussion, already knew where he was headed.

"He never said, 'What should I do about Social Security?' " said one of the participants in the meeting, Martin Anderson, who had been a domestic policy adviser in the Reagan administration. "On the day we talked about Social Security, he said, 'We have to find a way to allow people to invest a percentage of their payroll tax in the capital markets. What do you think?' "

Mr. Bush had long been intrigued by the idea of allowing workers to put part of their Social Security taxes into stocks and bonds. One Tuesday in the summer of 1978, in the heat of his unsuccessful race for a House seat from West Texas, Mr. Bush went to Midland Country Club to give a campaign speech to local real estate agents and discussed the issue in terms not much different from those he uses now.

Social Security "will be bust in 10 years unless there are some changes," he said, according to an account published the next day in The Midland Reporter-Telegram. "The ideal solution would be for Social Security to be made sound and people given the chance to invest the money the way they feel."

Two decades later, Mr. Bush's desire to change Social Security intersected with the promotion of private accounts by well-financed interest groups and conservative research organizations, which viewed the concept as innovative if ideologically explosive. What was once a fringe proposal has been propelled to the forefront of the national agenda in one of the biggest gambles of Mr. Bush's political career, and in one of the most concerted challenges since the New Deal to liberal assumptions about the relationship of individuals, the government and the market.

Mr. Bush has told aides that he cannot remember precisely when he was introduced to the idea of individual investing as part of Social Security, and until he ran for president he did not have a high profile on the issue. But he comes from a family with deep roots on Wall Street; his great-grandfather founded an investment bank, and his grandfather later ran Brown Brothers Harriman, one of the most prominent firms in the world of finance. His early political education included exposure to the ideas of Senator Barry Goldwater, the conservative standard-bearer who in 1964 was among the first Republicans to make a national issue of private investing as an alternative to traditional Social Security, and Ronald Reagan, who also took up the idea.

In Texas, before and during his years as governor, aides say, Mr. Bush learned about counties that had opted out of Social Security under an old federal provision and instead offered their employees investment accounts. As governor, his involvement in issues relating to Latin America piqued his interest in Chile's retirement system, which gave workers the chance to invest and became a prototype for other nations.

As he prepared to run for president, Mr. Bush sought the opinions of people who shared his belief in private accounts, including Edward H. Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization; José Piñera, the architect of the Chilean system; and even a Swedish official who helped revamp his nation's retirement program.

"My sense was that he was predisposed to go in that direction," said Mr. Crane, who along with Mr. Piñera discussed the issue over dinner with Mr. Bush and his wife at the governor's mansion in September 1997. "I was surprised by how knowledgeable he was in terms of the questions he asked."

Other visitors to Austin also said they found Mr. Bush serious about the idea, and as the 2000 presidential election approached, increasingly convinced that the issue could be a political winner. In June 1999, Mr. Bush stood on a stage in Amana, Iowa, to announce that he was running for president. At the beginning of the speech, he set out three main goals: cutting taxes, reducing lawsuits and giving Americans "the option of investing part of their Social Security contributions in private accounts."

In addressing Social Security, he waded into an issue that had been the subject of political wars since the system was founded in 1935.

In the 1964 Republican presidential primaries, Mr. Goldwater suggested that Social Security be made voluntary, saying many people would do better by investing on their own. He was excoriated for his position by his own party and in the general election by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mr. Johnson's landslide victory over Mr. Goldwater helped cement Social Security's reputation as the "third rail" of American politics.

But Mr. Goldwater won important converts, among them Ronald Reagan, who continued through the mid-1970's to promote the idea of private investing as an alternative.

It is not clear how much effect Mr. Goldwater and Mr. Reagan had on the development of Mr. Bush's position. But Mr. Bush's father was a Goldwater supporter, and in 1963, during Mr. Bush's senior year of prep school, he had a copy of "Conscience of a Conservative," Mr. Goldwater's precampaign manifesto, according to "First Son," a biography of Mr. Bush by Bill Minutaglio.

In setting out one of the primary themes of "Conscience of a Conservative," that of individual responsibility in society, Mr. Goldwater pointed to Social Security as an example of where conservatives believed people should be "free throughout their lives to spend their earnings when and as they see fit."

Mr. Reagan clearly grabbed Mr. Bush's attention in 1978, when he backed Mr. Bush's opponent in the Republican primary for the House seat. Mr. Bush won the primary, but he remained under pressure in the general election to prove his conservative values. He ran on a platform of less regulation, lower taxes and other positions similar to those held by Mr. Goldwater and Mr. Reagan, including advocating private investment within Social Security.

Looking back at the 1978 race, Mr. Bush's aides played down any influence that Mr. Reagan might have had on his thinking about Social Security. Mr. Bush's position, they said, was partly derived from the increasingly urgent problems the system faced- it ran short of money and was nearly unable to pay benefits a few years later - and from a deep belief in private ownership and the wealth-building power of markets.

"It was never a new idea," said Allan B. Hubbard, who attended Harvard Business School with Mr. Bush in the mid-1970's and is now director of the National Economic Council at the White House. "It was always there, like tax cuts."

After Mr. Bush's defeat in the general election in 1978, another 16 years would pass before he ran for office again. During that period, the idea of private investing as part of Social Security all but disappeared from the national stage.

But the concept was becoming entrenched in the conservative agenda. Around the time of Mr. Bush's House race, Peter Ferrara, a student at Harvard Law School, was writing a 600-page paper that examined the general hypothesis advanced by Mr. Reagan and Mr. Goldwater: that in terms of return on investment, Social Security was a lousy deal compared with the stock market.

The paper came to the attention of Mr. Crane, who was then setting up the Cato Institute to promote limited government. Mr. Crane encouraged Mr. Ferrara to turn the paper into a book, which became the intellectual basis of Cato's long push, eventually joined by many other conservative and business groups, to inject private investing into Social Security.

"I wrote about it through the 1980's for every conservative think tank," Mr. Ferrara said. "The idea was to spread ownership of the idea and make it a movement proposal."

But it was not until the mid-1990's that various forces pushed the idea back onto the public stage.

One of those was the spread of private investing as a component of government-run pension systems in other countries. The approach taken by Chile had been adopted or expanded in various forms over the ensuing decade in Britain, Sweden and many developing nations.

Within the United States, workers had become increasingly comfortable with investing through 401(k) programs and individual retirement accounts, and by the late 1990's the stock market was booming, giving added allure to investing as a component of Social Security. Discussion of the concept was no longer restricted to Republican backbenchers.

When President Bill Clinton proclaimed in 1998 that it was time to "save" Social Security from the financial pressures of an aging population, he explicitly endorsed using the returns available in the financial markets to help, either by having the government invest some of Social Security's money or allowing individuals to do it.

"If there's any way we can get a higher rate of return in a market economy, while minimizing the risk, whether it's in either one of these approaches, we ought to go for it," Mr. Clinton said on July 27, 1998.

That same day, Mr. Bush met in Austin with a group of advisers that included George P. Schultz, a former secretary of state and treasury secretary; Michael Boskin, who had been head of the Council of Economic Advisers in the administration of Mr. Bush's father; and Mr. Anderson, the Reagan adviser.

That meeting grew from a less formal session Mr. Bush attended a few months earlier in Mr. Schultz's living room in Palo Alto, Calif. The gatherings covered most of the big domestic and foreign policy issues, including Social Security, and led to the establishment of an advisory system to help Mr. Bush delve more deeply into issues as he prepared for his presidential run. Over the next few years, he participated in discussions about the budgetary implications of moving to private accounts and in debates on detailed proposals.

By that time, Mr. Bush had also become familiar with what amounted to a laboratory for Social Security privatization. In 1981, Galveston and two other counties in Texas opted out of the Social Security system. They instead allowed their employees to join a private investment program, financed by contributions roughly equal to the Social Security payroll tax. That program, like the one in Chile, became a model often cited by conservatives as evidence that private accounts could work, although whether they result in a better deal for retirees is a matter of debate.

If Mr. Bush was hesitant, it stemmed from the political risks. Stephen Moore, a conservative activist, met with Mr. Bush in 1998 and found him sold on the principle of private accounts but not certain how to sell the country.

"His thought process was, how do you overcome the political obstacles to this?" Mr. Moore said.

Mr. Bush pressed ahead as if he had found the answer, but in some ways he never did. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, he talked in general about the advantages of private accounts, but he avoided details and never acknowledged in any but the vaguest of terms that putting Social Security on sound footing would involve benefit cuts.

He may be paying the price for that strategy now. Faced with the reality that overhauling Social Security will require unpopular votes, his own party in Congress has proven unenthusiastic, and Democrats have been almost solid in their opposition.

But Mr. Bush appears unbowed and no less committed to his approach than he was 27 years ago.

"I've touched it," Mr. Bush said in New Hampshire last week, referring to Social Security as the third rail of American politics. "I touched it in 2000, when I campaigned here and around the country. I touched it in 2004. And I really touched it at the State of the Union, because I believe we have a problem."

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Olbermann - Why I stopped blogging about politics so much

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

Why I stopped blogging about politics
Keith Olbermann

SECAUCUS - So much. The title should really read “Why I stopped blogging about politics so much.”

Something happened in December from which I’m just cooling down. It represents all the worst byproducts of this useful new form of media, and it underscores that we’re all going to have to figure out how to address them or the blogosphere will succumb to Global Warming long before the planet will.

On December 27th, we got an email from the lead lawyer for John Kerry in Ohio, Daniel J. Hoffheimer (remember him? It seems like only yesterday…) cautioning reporters “not to read more into” what the Kerry-Edwards campaign had just said about the authenticity of the election. “There are many allegations of fraud. But this presidential election is over. The Bush-Cheney ticket has won.” We ran several quotes from the email on Countdown that night, and more here on the blog.

Now, we can debate the merits of the email, and whether or not Senator Kerry’s people tantalized some of their supporters in the weeks after the election by first saying what seemed to be election-challenging things, and then saying “no, we didn’t mean thaaat.” But we can’t debate who Daniel Hoffheimer was, nor his standing in the Kerry camp, nor the fact that I wouldn’t get very far if I just made the news up every day, including quotations and even entire people.

Stop it. Stop that Fox joke you were thinking of.

Nonetheless, I got an email that night from a woman who identified herself only as Alexandra, who insisted “something clearly has happened to your coverage. Looks like ‘bait and switch’ to me… your quote (was that really true???) from the Kerry attorney saying they believed Bush really won (no fraud???) is so far fetched, I may as well have been listening to Karl Rove or Scott McClellan…”

Remembering the countless nerves frayed in the preceding two months, I replied gently to Ms. Alexandra, forwarding her Hoffheimer’s email.

The next afternoon she was back. “Can someone get a statement DIRECTLY from Kerry’s office that ‘Hoffmeier’ (sic) is INDEED his attorney? No one’s heard his name before (though maybe Bush/Cheney lawyers, or Karl Rove might have a clue)…”

As Charlie Brown used to say, arrrgh!

I sent Alexandra the name of Hoffheimer’s firm and suggested she check him out herself, and noted again that I wouldn’t get very far just making this stuff up out of whole cloth. Even the nutbags at both far ends of the political spectrum get called on that.

What wore me out, of course, was the idea that because I was presenting news that a viewer didn’t like, I had to have sold out to one party or another, and/or fabricated it. The woman presumed that I had created a fictional character, was stupid enough to quote him on national television, and was guilty of both these crimes and had to get a note from John Kerry that I wasn’t making it up.

If this is the ultimate impact of the blog on the MSM, we’re only going to have a newscast once every few months. We’ll be spending the intervening time preparing the footnotes and the affidavits.

This wasn’t the first complaint email I’d ever gotten, but it was the first out of hundreds of similar tone that actually reminded me of the late Senator Moynihan’s observation that we can all have our own opinions, but we can’t all have our own facts.

I’ll get over it. I hope Alexandra found Mr. Hoffheimer and that they’re very happy together.

And I should tell you that I’m still getting an e-mail or two a day from those individuals over at James Dobson’s Focus On The Family who are apparently just getting the memo. This is the “SpongeBob SquarePants” controversy from a month ago (you know, the one Bill O’Reilly said last week that he stopped, and “saved” SpongeBob). The writers continue to miss the point, and more importantly, to underscore how Dr. Dobson missed the boat on which area has long truly needed his tub-thumping and fervor. He should’ve founded something called Focus On The School System.

originally published February 22, 2005 | 12:54 p.m. ET

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Bank of America loses customer data

MSNBC.com

Bank of America loses customer data
Senators among up to 1.2 million federal employees affected

The Associated Press
Updated: 7:35 p.m. ET Feb. 25, 2005

CHARLOTTE, N.C. - Bank of America Corp. has lost computer data tapes containing personal information on up to 1.2 million federal employees, including some members of the U.S. Senate.

The lost data includes Social Security numbers and account information that could make customers of a federal government charge card program vulnerable to identity theft.

Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., is among those senators whose personal information is on the missing tapes, spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said.

“There were some senators’ Visa credit card accounts involved,” Schmaler said. “We don’t know how many, but he was one of them.”

The bank issued an apology.

“We deeply regret this unfortunate incident,” said Barbara Desoer, who is in charge of technology, service and fulfillment for the Charlotte-based bank. “The privacy of customer information receives the highest priority at Bank of America, and we take our responsibilities for safeguarding it very seriously.”

The bank will be sending letters to people whose private information was on the tapes -- probably hundreds of thousands of letters, according to Bank of America spokeswoman Alexandra Trower. While there were 1.2 million accounts on the tapes, some individuals had multiple accounts, she said.

Privacy incidents are keeping the U.S. Postal Service service busy lately. Just last week, a security breech at ChoicePoint Corp. led to that company sending 145,000 letters to exposed consumers.

Leahy has been a leader of calls this week for a Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry into whether more regulation of companies that buy and sell personal data is needed.

That came after the disclosure that ChoicePoint Inc., a data warehouser, had learned that as many as 140,000 consumers may have had their personal information compromised.

“I hope this latest incident at least will bring the issue closer to home so Congress will pay better attention to the rapid erosion of privacy rights that ordinary Americans are facing as more and more of their personal and financial information is collected and sold on databases that too often have too few privacy protections,” Leahy said in a statement Friday.

Baggage handlers suspected
U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he was told the data backup tapes were likely stolen off of a commercial plane by baggage handlers in December.

“Whether it is identity theft, terrorism, or other theft, in this new complicated world baggage handlers should have background checks and more care should be taken for who is hired for these increasingly sensitive positions,” he said.

Bank spokeswoman Eloise Hale called the system of shipping backup tapes “an industry practice and a routine bank practice. As a safety precaution measure, backup tapes are stored in different locations.”

She declined to give any more details about where and how the tapes are moved around the country.

The missing tapes include information on federal employees who use Bank of America “smart pay” charge cards for travel and expenses, Hale said Friday.

She said federal law enforcement officials were notified as soon as the tapes were discovered missing.

“The investigation to date has found no evidence to suggest the tapes or their content have been accessed or misused, and the tapes are now presumed lost,” the bank said in a news release.

Trower said the company would not comment on the format of the data on the tapes -- and wouldn't say if the data was encrypted -- but she said it would be "virtually impossible" for anyone who found the tapes to access the data.

MSNBC.com's Bob Sullivan contributed to this report.

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ChoicePoint Data Theft Fallout Spreads to 145,000

internetnews.com
ChoicePoint Data Theft Fallout Spreads to 145,000
By Tim Gray

Responding to pressure amid a growing PR mess after the breach of sensitive consumer data, credit-check company ChoicePoint (Quote, Chart) is notifying 145,000 people to be on the guard for identity theft.

The latest notices come after the company recently disclosed that an ID theft ring gained access to the company's vital credit information. Law enforcement officials have discovered some 750 people who have been victims of identity theft as a result of the operation, ChoicePoint said.

Chuck Jones, a spokesman for the Georgia-based data aggregating firm, said the company already alerted 35,000 Californians whose information, including credit reports, addresses and social security numbers, were compromised after the crime ring duped company officers into handing over valuable information. Now it is expanding its notices to another 110,000 Americans, bringing to 145,000 the number of citizens whose data may be at risk of being abused by identity thieves.

The con men posed as businessmen looking to do background checks on its own customers. The company is now in the process of notifying the remaining individuals.

"Anyone who does not receive a notice can be reasonably assured they have not been impacted by this fraud," Jones told internetnews.com.

ChoicePoint is a service used by landlords and merchants to conduct background checks on potential tenants and customers. It also has several law enforcement and government agencies as clients.

"There is a certain irony there," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. "They're not doing the thing they claim their service enables their customers to do," such as conduct background checks.

The information about the data theft came to light after ChoicePoint recently notified 35,000 residents of California that their information was compromised, in accordance with state law.

However, a chorus of attorneys general leaned on ChoicePoint to alert consumers in other states whose information may have been obtained by the thieves.

Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan, along with 18 other state attorneys general, contacted the company and urged it to expand its notification plans.

"Identity theft threatens a consumer's financial health, credit rating and peace of mind," Madigan said in a statement. "I will work to help make sure that ChoicePoint does the right thing by informing Illinoisans of any financial or identity theft risks they may face."

Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer for Counterpane Internet Security, said it was important for ChoicePoint to immediately come clean with everyone involved.

"My advice to ChoicePoint is simple: you realize that the people whose data has been stolen are not your customers, and it's smart business not to care in the least about their problem. But by not treating this as an opportunity for good public relations, you're inviting Congress to regulate you. And you're not going to like that."

The scam began last fall when the con men posed as businessmen looking to join the ChoicePoint service. They allegedly opened about 50 fraudulent accounts.

The offline data theft case comes amid a dramatic growth in identity theft cases overall, but especially online. According to Gartner (Quote, Chart), 9.4 million online U.S. adults were victimized by identity theft between April 2003 and April 2004. The losses amounted to $11.7 billion.

Security experts said there are many ways consumers and businesses can protect themselves from this type of "social engineering" scheme without passing new laws or legislation, starting with more vigilance and common sense about protecting vital information.

"We may need to look at the way we interact with other people and exactly who has access to our data," said former U.S. cyber-security czar Howard Schmidt, who is now president and CEO of R&H Security Consulting in Washington state. Schmidt said society's awareness of the importance of information, especially personal information, is growing. "Knowledge is the most important tool," he added.

The ring leader of the operation, Olatunji Oluwatosin, 41, was sentenced in Los Angeles County Court to 16 months in federal prison on Thursday, according to several published reports.

In a statement, ChoicePoint said it has "acted quickly to address the circumstances that led to the unauthorized access. We are continually updating our processes and procedures to ensure the integrity of our systems and the information they contain."

originally published February 18, 2005

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Kansas on My Mind

The New York Times
February 25, 2005

Kansas on My Mind
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Call it "What's the Matter With Kansas - The Cartoon Version."

The slime campaign has begun against AARP, which opposes Social Security privatization. There's no hard evidence that the people involved - some of them also responsible for the "Swift Boat" election smear - are taking orders from the White House. So you're free to believe that this is an independent venture. You're also free to believe in the tooth fairy.

Their first foray - an ad accusing the seniors' organization of being against the troops and for gay marriage - was notably inept. But they'll be back, and it's important to understand what they're up to.

The answer lies in "What's the Matter With Kansas?," Thomas Frank's meditation on how right-wingers, whose economic policies harm working Americans, nonetheless get so many of those working Americans to vote for them.

People like myself - members of what one scornful Bush aide called the "reality-based community" - tend to attribute the right's electoral victories to its success at spreading policy disinformation. And the campaign against Social Security certainly involves a lot of disinformation, both about how the current system works and about the consequences of privatization.

But if that were all there is to it, Social Security should be safe, because this particular disinformation campaign isn't going at all well. In fact, there's a sense of wonderment among defenders of Social Security about the other side's lack of preparation. The Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation have spent decades campaigning for privatization. Yet they weren't ready to answer even the most obvious questions about how it would work - like how benefits could be maintained for older Americans without a dangerous increase in debt.

Privatizers are even having a hard time pretending that they want to strengthen Social Security, not dismantle it. At one of Senator Rick Santorum's recent town-hall meetings promoting privatization, college Republicans began chanting, "Hey hey, ho ho, Social Security's got to go."

But before the anti-privatization forces assume that winning the rational arguments is enough, they need to read Mr. Frank.

The message of Mr. Frank's book is that the right has been able to win elections, despite the fact that its economic policies hurt workers, by portraying itself as the defender of mainstream values against a malevolent cultural elite. The right "mobilizes voters with explosive social issues, summoning public outrage ... which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends."

In Mr. Frank's view, this is a confidence trick: politicians like Mr. Santorum trumpet their defense of traditional values, but their true loyalty is to elitist economic policies. "Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. ... Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization." But it keeps working.

And this week we saw Mr. Frank's thesis acted out so crudely that it was as if someone had deliberately staged it. The right wants to dismantle Social Security, a successful program that is a pillar of stability for working Americans. AARP stands in the way. So without a moment's hesitation, the usual suspects declared that this organization of staid seniors is actually an anti-soldier, pro-gay-marriage leftist front.

It's tempting to dismiss this as an exceptional case in which right-wingers, unable to come up with a real cultural grievance to exploit, fabricated one out of thin air. But such fabrications are the rule, not the exception.

For example, for much of December viewers of Fox News were treated to a series of ominous warnings about "Christmas under siege" - the plot by secular humanists to take Christ out of America's favorite holiday. The evidence for such a plot consisted largely of occasions when someone in an official capacity said, "Happy holidays," instead of, "Merry Christmas."

So it doesn't matter that Social Security is a pro-family program that was created by and for America's greatest generation - and that it is especially crucial in poor but conservative states like Alabama and Arkansas, where it's the only thing keeping a majority of seniors above the poverty line. Right-wingers will still find ways to claim that anyone who opposes privatization supports terrorists and hates family values.

Their first attack may have missed the mark, but it's the shape of smears to come.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

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GREATEST PRESIDENT? HINT: HE WAS FIRST

yahoo news!

GREATEST PRESIDENT? HINT: HE WAS FIRST

Fri Feb 25, 7:59 PM ET

By Richard Reeves

LOS ANGELES -- Newspapers around the country celebrated Presidents Day by publishing a couple of new surveys designed to choose America's greatest president. One poll, done for Washington College, selected the old favorite, Abraham Lincoln. Another done by the Gallup Organization for CNN and USA Today chose a new champion, Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), with Bill Clinton (news - web sites) in second place.

Amazing! Reagan and Clinton? Proof positive, I assumed, that Americans have short attention spans and/or just don't know enough about history. That was the reason, I thought, that John F. Kennedy was ranked first in so many polls in recent decades.

To test that theory, I asked my class in "Politics and Media" at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California to rank the top five presidents. I fully expected them -- and any other group of bright young people -- to name Reagan and Clinton, pretty much depending on their own personal politics.

I thought wrong. This was the result, purely unscientific: Lincoln, 27 points; George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Clinton, 18; Kennedy, 15; Theodore Roosevelt, 9; Reagan, 7; Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, 3; James Madison, 2. John Adams and Lyndon Johnson each got one fifth-place vote. (The LBJ voter added a caveat: "Before Vietnam.")

It's a fascinating game, but one I have always declined to play because I know nothing about most 19th-century presidents -- except that I think James K. Polk is the most underrated, a tough guy who decided to take the West to make the United States a continental country. Manifest Destiny and all that.

Such rankings apparently began in the Nov. 1, 1948, issue of Life magazine. That journal, the television of its day, commissioned Arthur Schlesinger of Harvard (the father of the one still writing interesting history) to rank our chief executives, and he came up with a list of "The Great ... Near Great ... Average ... Below Average ... Failures." The great ones, rated by 55 historians, were the men who served at great turning points in history: Lincoln, Washington, FDR, Wilson, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.

To put that into perspective, the same issue, which hit the newsstands a week before the election that pitted New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey against President Harry S. Truman, ran a two-page photograph of Dewey captioned: "The Next President Travels by Ferry Boat Over the Broad Waters of San Francisco Bay."

In thinking about this, I came across a couple of surveys that make you think you don't know what to think.

Who were the most successful modern presidents in terms of preserving or improving the national economy? The best, according to an index created by Forbes magazine, which is the professional home of would-be Republican nominee Steve Forbes (news - web sites), was none other than ... Bill Clinton! Yep. If you crunch the numbers of gross domestic product growth, per capita income growth, employment gains, unemployment rate reduction, inflation reduction and federal deficit reduction, you come up with the man the Republicans wanted to impeach. In second place, it's Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy is third. Liberals all.

In fourth place, according to Forbes, comes Ronald Reagan, who had a great economy during his second term after a nasty recession in his first. But he always blamed the bad times on Jimmy Carter, who, Forbes adds, had the greatest job growth record of any president in history -- unfortunately he also broke records for inflation and interest-rate growth.

Finally, there are the rankings of ConservativeTruth.org, which advertises itself as "The Antidote to the Liberal News Media." Bruce Walker of that organization ranks the five best presidents this way: 1. Washington; 2. Jefferson; 3. Reagan; 4. Lincoln; 5. George W. Bush.

Walker should have quit while he was ahead. He downgrades Lincoln, not without reason, for accomplishing his goals by bloodshed, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives, and for choosing a vice president, Andrew Johnson, who became one of the worst presidents in American history. Interesting.

I suppose I could be the antidote to Walker, but, in fact, I agree with him and his reasoning on George Washington. Says Walker: "Not just the father of his country, but in many ways the father of limited and representative government, Washington changed political history forever and for the better."

The greatest political event in our history, perhaps all history, was Washington's rejection of monarchy or of a presidency for life. His decision to go home in 1797 was what made our democracy and others possible. There was a man!

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