South Dakota Nears Historic Nov. 7 Referendum on Ban of Virtually All Abortions

ABC News
South Dakota Nears Vote on Abortion Ban
South Dakota Nears Historic Nov. 7 Referendum on Ban of Virtually All Abortions
By DAVID CRARY
The Associated Press

WESSINGTON SPRINGS, S.D. - Circled around a living room, sipping coffee, five long-acquainted couples grappled with their stark differences on a topic they would have skirted in the past but now cannot avoid abortion.

Like other South Dakotans, people in this tiny farming town are confronting a historic opportunity on Nov. 7. They'll sway a tortuous national debate by making a choice no statewide electorate has faced before: whether to approve a sweeping ban on virtually all abortions.

"None of us think abortion is a desirable thing," said Tom Dean, a family physician who hosted the discussion along with his wife, Kathy. "But it's not a problem for government to solve by passing a rigid law."

Yet Lynn Ogren, who helps her husband run a sheep and cattle ranch, choked up with emotion as she explained her support for the ban.

"I value every child's life, whether it's from a rape or not," she told her friends. "Who's fighting for these kids?"

The measure would allow abortions only to save a pregnant woman's life. It makes no exception for other health concerns, or for cases of rape or incest; a doctor performing illegal abortions could face five years in prison.

The Legislature passed the law overwhelmingly in February, expecting it to be challenged in court and perhaps lead to a U.S. Supreme Court reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. Instead of suing, opponents swiftly collected signatures to force a referendum; the law will be scrapped if voters reject it.

Each side depicts the other as dominated by out-of-state groups and indeed such forces are active, viewing the vote as an unprecedented gauge of public sentiment on abortion. The Rev. Jerry Falwell has urged his conservative followers to donate in support of the ban; Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America have raised funds to oppose it.

"We're David, they're Goliath," contended Leslee Unruh, head of the campaign group supporting the ban. Parked outside her VoteYesForLife.com office in Sioux Falls were cars with a blunt bumper sticker: "The Killing Stops Here."

The most recent independent poll, in July, found 47 percent of voters opposed the ban, 39 percent favored it, 14 percent were undecided. When asked if they would approve a ban with exceptions for rape and incest, support rose to 59 percent.

Unruh, who had an abortion years ago that she now regrets, says momentum is turning as more voters hear her side's core message: Abortion hurts women. In the event of defeat, she vows to keep fighting.

"Sometimes it's not about votes it's about the truth," she said.

Jan Nicolay, a former school principal and Republican state legislator, is co-chair of the campaign to keep abortion legal. She knows the stakes are high.

"People from other states are telling me, 'You're in the limelight. Good luck. Please do everything you can to defeat it,'" she said.

Among her colleagues is Russ Tarver, a retired Methodist minister who signed a statement against the abortion ban along with 16 other ministers. "Some legislators were stunned to learn there were pastors on the other side of the issue," he said.

If the ban is defeated, anti-abortion activists might try again later with a milder version making exceptions for rape and incest, but the outcome would be heralded nationally as a major victory for abortion rights. If the ban is approved, several other state legislatures might follow South Dakota's example building momentum for a possible Supreme Court review of Roe v. Wade.

Each side has recruited South Dakota rape victims to aid their campaigns. Connie Pich, impregnated by a rapist as a teenager in 1973, said victims must be able to choose freely whether to bear the child. On the pro-ban side, Megan Barnett has spoken at the Legislature and in campaign videos about how glad she is to have borne a daughter resulting from a rape.

Barnett, in a telephone interview, expressed empathy with women in comparable plights, but said abortion shouldn't be an option.

"Two wrongs don't make a right," she said. "It's a baby, whether you're raped or not. You need a choice both you and your baby can live with."

The ban's supporters note that the measure allows rape and incest victims to get emergency contraception, which is effective if taken within 72 hours. Opponents say emergency contraception isn't widely available in South Dakota, and argue that many victims are too overwrought to seek prompt help.

"It's a sham," Nicolay said of the contraception provision. She noted that anti-abortion lawmakers quashed a measure this year that would have required hospitals to inform raped women that emergency contraception is available.

One of the legislators responsible for the toughly worded measure is House Majority Leader Larry Rhoden, a Republican cattle rancher. He was swayed by women's testimony that their abortions left emotional scars, but now aware of polls showing his side behind he has second thoughts.

"I've spent a great deal of time and thought wondering if it would have been wiser to write in the exceptions," he said. "We have a long row to hoe based on the numbers I've seen."

In some ways, South Dakota is an odd venue for the showdown. It has had no resident abortion provider for 10 years, and most of its 800 or so annual abortions are performed at an often-picketed Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls by doctors flying in once a week from Minnesota.

Sarah Stoesz, president of Planned Parenthood's Minnesota/Dakotas chapter, said even people on the sidelines of the abortion debate rallied to help the petition drive after lawmakers approved the ban.

"It was a political moment like I've never seen, a spontaneous uprising of grass-roots fury," she said. "Abortion isn't a subject people normally discuss, but this has forced ordinary mainstream people to talk about it."

A case in point is Wessington Springs, a town of 1,000 where pride in its seven churches and Shakespearean Gardens mingles with worries over business failures and an exodus of young people.

Tom Dean, whose family's local roots date to 1882, and his wife, Kathy, a nurse-midwife, decided to serve on the anti-ban campaign's statewide board, then placed a small ad in the local paper explaining their stance.

"We were a little concerned not for our safety, but of offending our friends," said Kathy Dean, a longtime abortion-rights supporter.

For several years, the Deans have hosted a monthly discussion group, broaching an array of topics. Its members recently convened to wrestle with the abortion ban.

Near the end, after listening in silence, Evelyn Bradley spoke out.

"Life isn't always black and white," said Bradley, the wife of an Air Force retiree. "There are situations where it would be really difficult to have another child, and I'd resent the law saying you have to have it. Shouldn't I be allowed to make that choice?"

The issue has been raised at the town's Roman Catholic church by the priest, Jim Friedrich, who fervently supports the ban.

"So far no one (in the parish) has spoken against it," he said quietly in his rectory. "The way I spoke, I doubt they'd have the guts to tell me otherwise."

John Paulson, minister at nearby Our Savior's Lutheran Church, takes a different tack.

"We can't read God's mind on this," he said. "As pastor, I'd support people voting their conscience with a prayerful heart."

On the Net:

Anti-ban campaign: http://www.sdhealthyfamilies.org

Pro-ban campaign: http://www.voteyesforlife.com

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Lotsa Bush Books Out

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Where Have You Been Woodward?

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Never Mind. Wrong Number.

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Disgraced Congressmen Don't Need Lawyers . . .

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With me as an advisor . . .

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Election Commission Alters Rule on Money Used for Recounts

The New York Times
Election Commission Alters Rule on Money Used for Recounts
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 (AP) — Changing nearly 30 years of election policy, federal regulators said Wednesday that money used to pay for vote recounts and legal challenges was subject to campaign finance restrictions on contributions and expenditures.

The 4-to-2 decision by the Federal Election Commission affects House and Senate candidates as well as state parties. It could be especially significant this year when both political parties are bracing for potential postelection challenges to results in tight Congressional races.

“This is going to make them work a little harder to raise the money,” said Ellen L. Weintraub, a commissioner and a Democrat, who offered a compromise to break a 3-to-3 deadlock. “But it’s doable.”

At issue was whether a 2002 campaign finance law that did away with unrestricted and unlimited giving to the political parties altered regulations adopted in 1977. The decision redefined those regulations.

The commission’s chairman, Michael E. Toner, the commission chairman, and Hans von Spakovsky, a commissioner, both Republicans, voted against the compromise, saying that the campaign finance law applied only to the election, not recounts. Mr. Toner also objected to the timing of the change, noting that it came only five weeks before the Nov. 7 elections.

In making its decision, the commission recognized that recounts were expensive. As a result, the contributions that candidates raise from individuals for their recount accounts will not count against their fund-raising for the election. Under current law, a candidate can receive donations up to $2,100 from an individual for each election.

Now a contributor who had already reached the donation limit with a candidate could contribute also to the recount account.

Similarly, while the state parties would have to abide by the $10,000 contribution limits that apply to them, they would not have to live within limitations on spending for so-called coordinated expenditures with federal candidates.

As before, neither candidates nor state parties will be able to raise money from labor unions, corporations or foreign citizens.

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Security Gaps in Medicare and Medicaid

The New York Times
Security Gaps in Medicare and Medicaid
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 — Federal investigators say they have found serious computer security flaws that could lead to the improper disclosure of sensitive medical information on people enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid.

In a new report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said “key information security controls were missing” from a huge communication network used by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

As a result, they said, sensitive, personally identifiable information “could be improperly modified, disclosed or deleted.” Moreover, the report said, “these weaknesses could lead to disruptions in services” to millions of Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.

The network is used to pay claims and to communicate with state Medicaid agencies, health care providers and many private contractors.

Dr. Mark B. McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said none of the flaws had led to “actual security breaches.” Dr. McClellan said he was taking steps to fix the problems.

But the G.A.O. said Medicare officials would not necessarily know if a security breach had occurred because they had no “audit trail” to document use of the computer network, or a reliable way to detect intrusions into their computers.

In their report, the investigators described several problems:

¶The potential for unauthorized users to gain access to the agency’s computers because of a lack of strict password controls. Passwords are often so simple that outsiders can guess them.

¶Medicare and Medicaid data not being encrypted. “This could allow an attacker to view medical information” on beneficiaries.

¶A failure to keep complete records of who uses the network, so it cannot be determined who views or modifies files.

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who requested the investigation, said Medicare officials needed “to get on top of these shortcomings immediately.”

“Beneficiaries not only rely on Medicare for their health care coverage,” said Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid, “they expect that the private information they entrust to the government is kept private, safe and secure.”

Concern about computer security has increased since May, when the Department of Veterans Affairs reported a laptop computer with personal information on millions of veterans had been stolen from the home of an agency employee.

Dr. McClellan said, “We are very concerned about the specific control weaknesses” identified in the latest report. The computer network carries immense amounts of data with personal information on beneficiaries, including name, sex, date of birth, Social Security number and home address. The network also transmits medical and financial information, showing the diagnosis of a patient’s illness, prescriptions, names of doctors and hospitals, services provided and the amounts paid.

Daniel R. Levinson, the inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, and his predecessors have expressed concern about weaknesses in Medicare computer security. The weaknesses “could ultimately result in unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, improper Medicare payments or disruption of critical operations,” Mr. Levinson warned last year.

The computer network connects the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with banks, insurance companies, hospitals, nursing homes, health plans, other federal agencies and private contractors that pay claims for the government.

Medicare paid more than 1.1 billion claims last year. The size of its computer network and the number of transactions increased this year with the addition of a prescription drug benefit. The new program fills more than three million prescriptions a day. Insurers must file detailed data on each transaction.

In June, Medicare officials warned Humana after a company employee left personal information on 17,000 Medicare beneficiaries unsecured on a hotel computer in Baltimore.

The Bush administration is encouraging adoption of electronic health records and is urging doctors to send prescriptions electronically to drugstores. It is also asking beneficiaries to keep track of their health information, including Medicare claims and prescriptions, by using a new online service at www.MyMedicare.gov. In fine print, the government says it “does not warrant the accuracy” of information on the Web site.

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Republican Coward of the Day: Tom Kean Jr.

Huffington Post
Bob Geiger
Republican Coward of the Day: Tom Kean Jr.

After a debate this morning at CBS studios in Manhattan with New Jersey Senatorial candidates Robert Menendez and Tom Kean Jr., JoAnn Sohl, a member of the anti-war group Military Families Speak Out (MFSO), tried to talk to Republican Kean about his "stay the course" strategy for Iraq.

Sohl, whose son is serving in Iraq, got the usual, cowardly brush-off given to military families by Republicans when spouses or parents of troops demand answers on the lies that put our people in Iraq and the Republican goal of keeping them smack-dab in the middle of a civil war.

A few months ago, MFSO requested meetings with both Menendez and Kean Jr. to talk to them about the war. Both accepted the meetings, but Kean Jr. decided to get up and walk out in the middle of his meeting, saying that he'd get back to the military families in writing. He never did.

When Sohl again attempted to talk to Kean Jr. after the debate, Kean scampered off and left his Rove-like campaign manager, Evan Koslow, to blow her off.

Watch the video and you'll see that Kean Jr. goes to the back of the room, stands alone and cowers while his campaign hack continues to tell a military Mom whose questions have clearly not been answered, that they have.

It's disgusting, but it's precisely what we've come to expect from the GOP at this point.

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Cheney Back Delivering the Grim Campaign Speech

washingtonpost.com
Cheney Back Delivering the Grim Campaign Speech
Democrats Cast As Foils to the Nation's Security
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writer

MILWAUKEE -- Vice President Cheney sometimes starts speeches with a Ronald Reagan quotation about a "happy" nation needing "hope and faith." But not much happy talk follows. Not a lot of hope, either. He does, though, talk about the prospect of "mass death in the United States."

The not-so-happy warrior of the past two campaign cycles is back on the road delivering a grim message about danger, defeatism and the stakes of the coming election. If it is not a joyful exercise, it is at least a relentless one. Even with poll ratings lower than President Bush's, Cheney has become a more ubiquitous presence on the campaign trail than in the last midterm election.

He takes on not only the traditional vice presidential assignment of slicing up the opposition but also the Cassandra role of warning about dire threats to the nation's security. While others get distracted by Capitol Hill scandal, Cheney remains focused on the terrorists, who are, as he says in his stump speech, "still lethal, still desperately trying to hit us again." Bush, he says, is "protecting America" while the Democrats advocate "reckless" policies that add up to a "strategy of resignation and defeatism in the face of determined enemies."

But the message is carefully targeted. More than half of Cheney's fundraisers in this two-year cycle have been behind closed doors. Even at a lunchtime speech to Wisconsin Republican donors that was open to reporters, gubernatorial candidate Rep. Mark Green did not stand on stage, ensuring no pictures of the two together on the news, and some other Republican candidates did not attend at all.

That is okay with the White House, which at a perilous moment is counting on Cheney's under-the-radar campaign to rally the base, not the broader public. "The fact that he's willing to go after Democrats as harshly as the Democrats are going after the White House gets the party faithful going," said GOP strategist Glen Bolger.

It happens to inflame the Democratic faithful as well, and party strategists consider him a prime target for their own pitch to voters. "When he threatens Democrats and calls them names, it's something that really fires up our base," said John Lapp, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's independent expenditure program.

Cheney's fundraising visits often end up as fodder for opponents of those he tries to help. "Dick Cheney, Big Oil and Big Drug Companies Threw Curt Weldon a secret Washington thank you party," reads a Democratic brochure targeting the Republican Pennsylvania congressman. "And we got stuck with the bill."

The campaign comes at a pivotal moment for Cheney. His influence within the administration is widely perceived to be waning as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's star rises. The president in his second term has adopted a more diplomatic approach to problems such as Iran and North Korea than insiders believe would be to Cheney's liking. And as the 2008 presidential sweepstakes heat up, he will be the first vice president in a generation not to be seeking a promotion, leaving him on the sidelines of the most important national discussion.

But White House aides said it would be a mistake to underestimate Cheney even now. Although he is viewed favorably by just 34 percent of the public in the most recent Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, he remains a champion of conservatives at a time when the right has been angry at Bush over issues such as deficit spending and immigration. So Cheney's mission is to bring home core Republican voters when they are needed most.

"He's a good carrier of the Republican message," said Michigan GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis, noting that a Cheney visit to Grand Rapids last month raised between $750,000 and $1 million, a record for western Michigan. "He exudes a confidence. He makes you feel good and comfortable that he's vice president of the country."

Cheney's job is "a lot of volume, a lot of what we call McFundraisers," GOP lobbyist Ed Rogers said. Cheney has headlined 111 fundraisers so far in this two-year cycle, bringing in more than $39 million and already surpassing his total of 106 events for the entire 2002 cycle. Cheney is also regularly dispatched to conservative radio shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. He takes the shots the White House does not want Bush to take or wants to test out first. When Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) was defeated by antiwar challenger Ned Lamont in a primary, Cheney called reporters to say the result would encourage "al-Qaeda types" who want "to break the will of the American people."

Out here on the hustings, Cheney does not come across as the most natural campaigner. A Cheney speech does not draw its audience to its feet. It plods through an argument that is more sobering than inspiring. He delivers even red-meat lines in a flat monotone, sounding more like a chief executive reporting to shareholders than a politician issuing a call to action.

The vice president, though, goes after Democrats by name in a way Bush rarely does, including Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.), Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.) and party Chairman Howard Dean. At a fundraiser in Sarasota, Fla., last week, he also singled out Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.) and Reps. John Conyers (Mich.), Henry A. Waxman (Calif.) and Barney Frank (Mass.).

He talks mainly about terrorism and Iraq, arguing that U.S. withdrawals from Lebanon after the Marine barracks bombing in 1983 and from Somalia after the "Black Hawk Down" ambush in 1993 emboldened terrorists. "If we follow Congressman Murtha's advice and withdraw from Iraq the same way we withdrew from Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993, all we will do is validate the al-Qaeda strategy and invite even more terrorist attacks," Cheney said in Milwaukee. In Houston last week, he accused Democrats of "apparently having lost their perspective concerning the nature of the enemy."

The crux of his pitch is what he calls the continuing "danger to civilization." Cheney, who warned in 2004 that the United States would be hit by terrorists if Democrat John F. Kerry was elected president, has not gone that far this time but does say that it "is not an accident" that the country has not suffered another attack since Sept. 11, 2001, giving Bush credit.

Democrats regularly punch back, suggesting Cheney is out of touch and desperate. "At a time when the Bush Administration finds itself increasingly isolated on Iraq, Vice President Cheney today went on the attack," Senate Democrats said in a statement last week. "Instead of ranting and raving on the campaign trail, Bush and Cheney should spend their time on the trail of Osama bin Laden."

Five years after Sept. 11, Cheney's message may be wearing. Some find it too limited. "To tell you the truth, I was a little disappointed," David Huibregtse, head of Wisconsin's Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay party members, said after a speech. "Too much on how great President Bush is doing and very little on why we should vote for the Republicans."

Yet it still resonates in certain quarters. Between fundraisers, Cheney addressed a Michigan National Guard rally, an ostensibly nonpartisan event that nonetheless provided helpful photos of him surrounded by soldiers in uniform.

Dick Szymanski, a manufacturing executive whose son serves in the Marines, applauded the vice president's message. "We respect him," Szymanski said. "It's a very, very hard job that he and the president have, that they've had handed to them. You can belittle people for the things they should or should not have done. But they're there trying to take care of the public."

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U.S. Casualties in Iraq Rise Sharply

washingtonpost.com
U.S. Casualties in Iraq Rise Sharply
Growing American Role in Staving Off Civil War Leads to Most Wounded Since 2004
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer

The number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad to try to check a spiral of sectarian violence that U.S. commanders warn could lead to civil war.

Last month, 776 U.S. troops were wounded in action in Iraq, the highest number since the military assault to retake the insurgent-held city of Fallujah in November 2004, according to Defense Department data. It was the fourth-highest monthly total since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The sharp increase in American wounded -- with nearly 300 more in the first week of October -- is a grim measure of the degree to which the U.S. military has been thrust into the lead of the effort to stave off full-scale civil war in Iraq, military officials and experts say. Beyond Baghdad, Marines battling Sunni insurgents in Iraq's western province of Anbar last month also suffered their highest number of wounded in action since late 2004.

More than 20,000 U.S. troops have been wounded in combat in the Iraq war, and about half have returned to duty. While much media reporting has focused on the more than 2,700 killed, military experts say the number of wounded is a more accurate gauge of the fierceness of fighting because advances in armor and medical care today allow many service members to survive who would have perished in past wars. The ratio of wounded to killed among U.S. forces in Iraq is about 8 to 1, compared with 3 to 1 in Vietnam.

"These days, wounded are a much better measure of the intensity of the operations than killed," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

The surge in wounded comes as U.S. commanders issue increasingly dire warnings about the threat of civil war in Iraq, all but ruling out cuts in the current contingent of more than 140,000 U.S. troops before the spring of 2007. Last month Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top commander in the Middle East, said "sectarian tensions, if left unchecked, could be fatal to Iraq," making it imperative that the U.S. military now focus its "main effort" squarely on Baghdad.

Thousands of additional U.S. troops have been ordered to Baghdad since July to reinforce Iraqi soldiers and police who failed to halt -- or were in some cases complicit in -- a wave of hundreds of killings of Iraqi civilians by rival Sunni and Shiite groups.

U.S. commanders have appealed for weeks for 3,000 more Iraqi army troops to help secure Baghdad but as of Thursday had received only a few hundred, according to military officials in the Iraqi capital. Mistrust of Iraqi police in Baghdad remains high, Abizaid said. Last week, an Iraqi police brigade with hundreds of officers was removed from duty over its involvement in sectarian killings.

"The Baghdad security plan and the general spiral of operations is driving us to be more active than we have been in recent months," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "We have more people on patrols and out of base, so we get more people hurt and killed in firefights," he said, explaining that U.S. military offensives -- more than other factors such as shifting enemy tactics -- tend to drive the number of American casualties.

In March, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that Iraqi forces -- not U.S. troops -- would deal with a civil war in Iraq "to the extent one were to occur." Today's operations in Baghdad demonstrate that that goal was not realistic, experts say.

"In a sense, the Baghdad security plan is a complete repudiation of the earlier Rumsfeld doctrine where he said the Iraqis would prevent the civil war," said O'Hanlon.

Despite the mounting cost in U.S. wounded and dead -- including 13 American soldiers killed in combat in Baghdad in three days last week -- Pentagon officials say aggressive military operations in the Iraqi capital are at best a short-term and partial solution, buying time for political compromise, which they call the only way to arrest Iraq's disintegration.

"The Baghdad security plan will only be a temporary fix," said a Pentagon official who has served in Iraq. "You need to address the root causes," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The rising toll of wounded reflects ongoing heavy combat in Anbar as well as in Baghdad, where U.S. troops face an escalation of small-arms and other attacks as they push into the city's most violent neighborhoods to rein in sectarian death squads, militias and insurgents, officers say.

"Attacks against the coalition have definitely increased as . . . the enemy is trying to come in and reestablish themselves" in a dozen religiously divided districts in east and west Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington, a spokesman for the U.S. military command in the city. "There's a lot of weapons in Baghdad," contributing to an increase in enemy attacks using small arms, he said.

Withington said he was not authorized to release the number of U.S. military personnel wounded in Baghdad or the number of attacks in the city, although the military has released such data in the past.

A survey of reports on combat deaths from August through early October, however, shows an increase in those killed in Baghdad from small-arms fire as well as bombs along roads. Dense urban terrain in the city of 6 million people, where enemy fighters have many places to hide and can attack from close quarters, reduces the advantage of the better-trained and better-equipped U.S. forces.

"September was horrific" in terms of the toll of wounded, and if the early October trend continues, this month could be "the worst month of the war," said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia-based Web site that tracks defense issues.

The worsening violence in Baghdad has led some Pentagon officials to criticize decisions by the U.S. military since early 2005 to transfer responsibility for security in large swaths of Baghdad to Iraqi forces while cutting back on American patrols.

"We made decisions to take an indirect approach, which is great if you want low U.S. casualty rates," said the Pentagon official. However, he said: "Passing responsibility to Iraqis does not equal defeating terrorists and neutralizing the insurgency. Period."

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Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers

The New York Times
Evangelicals Fear the Loss of Their Teenagers
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Correction Appended

Despite their packed megachurches, their political clout and their increasing visibility on the national stage, evangelical Christian leaders are warning one another that their teenagers are abandoning the faith in droves.

At an unusual series of leadership meetings in 44 cities this fall, more than 6,000 pastors are hearing dire forecasts from some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement.

Their alarm has been stoked by a highly suspect claim that if current trends continue, only 4 percent of teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. That would be a sharp decline compared with 35 percent of the current generation of baby boomers, and before that, 65 percent of the World War II generation.

While some critics say the statistics are greatly exaggerated (one evangelical magazine for youth ministers dubbed it “the 4 percent panic attack”), there is widespread consensus among evangelical leaders that they risk losing their teenagers.

“I’m looking at the data,” said Ron Luce, who organized the meetings and founded Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”

The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”

Among the leaders speaking at the meetings are Ted Haggard, president of the evangelical association; the Rev. Jerry Falwell; and nationally known preachers like Jack Hayford and Tommy Barnett.

Genuine alarm can be heard from Christian teenagers and youth pastors, who say they cannot compete against a pervasive culture of cynicism about religion, and the casual “hooking up” approach to sex so pervasive on MTV, on Web sites for teenagers and in hip-hop, rap and rock music. Divorced parents and dysfunctional families also lead some teenagers to avoid church entirely or to drift away.

Over and over in interviews, evangelical teenagers said they felt like a tiny, beleaguered minority in their schools and neighborhoods. They said they often felt alone in their struggles to live by their “Biblical values” by avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.

When Eric Soto, 18, transferred from a small charter school to a large public high school in Chicago, he said he was disappointed to find that an extracurricular Bible study attracted only five to eight students. “When we brought food, we thought we could get a better turnout,” he said. They got 12.

Chelsea Dunford, a 17-year old from Canton, Conn., said, “At school I don’t have a lot of friends who are Christians.”

Ms. Dunford spoke late last month as she and her small church youth group were about to join more than 3,400 teenagers in a sports arena at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for a Christian youth extravaganza and rock concert called Acquire the Fire.

“A lot of my friends are self-proclaimed agnostics or atheists,” said Ms. Dunford, who wears a bracelet with a heart-shaped charm engraved with “tlw,” for “true love waits,” to remind herself of her pledge not to have premarital sex.

She said her friends were more prone to use profanity and party than she was, and added: “It’s scary sometimes. You get made fun of.”

To break the isolation and bolster the teenagers’ commitment to a conservative lifestyle, Mr. Luce has been organizing these stadium extravaganzas for 15 years. The event in Amherst was the first of 40 that Teen Mania is putting on between now and May, on a breakneck schedule that resembles a road trip for a major touring band. The “roadies” are 700 teenagers who have interned for a year at Teen Mania’s “Honor Academy” in Garden Valley, Tex.

More than two million teenagers have attended in the last 15 years, said Mr. Luce, a 45-year-old, mop-headed father of three with a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard and the star power of an aging rock guitarist.

“That’s more than Paul McCartney has pulled in,” Mr. Luce asserted, before bounding onstage for the opening pyrotechnics and a prayer.

For the next two days, the teenagers in the arena pogoed to Christian bands, pledged to lead their friends to Christ and sang an anthem with the chorus, “We won’t be silent.” Hundreds streamed down the aisles for the altar call and knelt in front of the stage, some weeping openly as they prayed to give their lives to God.

The next morning, Mr. Luce led the crowd in an exercise in which they wrote on scraps of paper all the negative cultural influences, brand names, products and television shows that they planned to excise from their lives. Again they streamed down the aisles, this time to throw away the “cultural garbage.”

Trash cans filled with folded pieces of paper on which the teenagers had scribbled things like Ryan Seacrest, Louis Vuitton, “Gilmore Girls,” “Days of Our Lives,” Iron Maiden, Harry Potter, “need for a boyfriend” and “my perfect teeth obsession.” One had written in tiny letters: “fornication.”

Some teenagers threw away cigarette lighters, brand-name sweatshirts, Mardi Gras beads and CD’s — one titled “I’m a Hustla.”

“Lord Jesus,” Mr. Luce prayed into the microphone as the teenagers dropped their notes into the trash, “I strip off the identity of the world, and this morning I clothe myself with Christ, with his lifestyle. That’s what I want to be known for.”

Evangelical adults, like believers of every faith, fret about losing the next generation, said the Rev. David W. Key, director of Baptist Studies at the Candler School of Theology of Emory University, in Atlanta.

“The uniqueness of the evangelical situation is the fact that during the 80’s and 90’s you had the Reagan revolution that was growing the evangelical churches,” Mr. Key said.

Today, he said, the culture trivializes religion and normalizes secularism and liberal sexual mores.

The phenomenon may not be that young evangelicals are abandoning their faith, but that they are abandoning the institutional church, said Lauren Sandler, author of “Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement” (Viking, 2006). Ms. Sandler, who calls herself a secular liberal, said she found the movement frighteningly robust.

“This generation is not about church,” said Ms. Sandler, an editor at Salon.com. “They always say, ‘We take our faith outside the four walls.’ For a lot of young evangelicals, church is a rock festival, or a skate park or hanging out in someone’s basement.”

Contradicting the sense of isolation expressed by some evangelical teenagers, Ms. Sandler said, “I met plenty of kids who told me over and over that if you’re not Christian in your high school, you’re not cool — kids with Mohawks, with indie rock bands who feel peer pressure to be Christian.”

The reality is, when it comes to organizing youth, evangelical Christians are the envy of Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Jews, said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame, who specializes in the study of American evangelicals and surveyed teens for his book “Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual lives of American Teenagers” (Oxford, 2005).

Mr. Smith said he was skeptical about the 4 percent statistic. He said the figure was from a footnote in a book and was inconsistent with research he had conducted and reviewed, which has found that evangelical teenagers are more likely to remain involved with their faith than are mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews and teenagers of almost every other religion.

“A lot of the goals I’m very supportive of,” Mr. Smith said of the new evangelical youth campaign, “but it just kills me that it’s framed in such apocalyptic terms that couldn’t possibly hold up under half a second of scrutiny. It’s just self-defeating.”

The 4 percent is cited in the book “The Bridger Generation” by Thom S. Rainer, a Southern Baptist and a former professor of ministry. Mr. Rainer said in an interview that it came from a poll he had commissioned, and that while he thought the methodology was reliable, the poll was 10 years old.

“I would have to, with integrity, say there has been no significant follow-up to see if the numbers are still valid,” Mr. Rainer said.

Mr. Luce seems weary of criticism that his message is overly alarmist. He said that a current poll by the well-known evangelical pollster George Barna found that 5 percent of teenagers were Bible-believing Christians. Some criticize Mr. Barna’s methodology, however, for defining “Bible-believing” so narrowly that it excludes most people who consider themselves Christians.

Mr. Luce responded: “If the 4 percent is true, or even the 5 percent, it’s an indictment of youth ministry. So certainly they’re going to want different data.”

Outside the arena in Amherst, the teenagers at Mr. Luce’s Acquire the Fire extravaganza mobbed the tables hawking T-shirts and CD’s stamped: “Branded by God.” Mr. Luce’s strategy is to replace MTV’s wares with those of an alternative Christian culture, so teenagers will link their identity to Christ and not to the latest flesh-baring pop star.

Apparently, the strategy can show results. In Chicago, Eric Soto said he returned from a stadium event in Detroit in the spring to find that other teenagers in the hallways were also wearing “Acquire the Fire” T-shirts.

“You were there? You’re a Christian?” he said the young people would say to one another. “The fire doesn’t die once you leave the stadium. But it’s a challenge to keep it burning.”

Correction: Oct. 7, 2006

A front-page article yesterday about evangelical Christian teenagers gave an incorrect academic credential for Ron Luce, the founder of Teen Mania, a youth ministry that organizes “Acquire the Fire” stadium events. He is a graduate of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, where he received a certificate from the Owner President Management program. He did not earn a master’s degree from the school.

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Anti-U.S. Attack Videos Spread on Web

The New York Times
Anti-U.S. Attack Videos Spread on Web
By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 5 — Videos showing insurgent attacks against American troops in Iraq, long available in Baghdad shops and on Jihadist Web sites, have steadily migrated in recent months to popular Internet video-sharing sites, including YouTube and Google Video.

Many of the videos, showing sniper attacks against Americans and roadside bombs exploding under American military vehicles, have been posted not by insurgents or their official supporters but apparently by Internet users in the United States and other countries, who have passed along videos found elsewhere.

Among the scenes being viewed daily by thousands of users of the sites are sniper attacks in which Americans are felled by snipers as a camera records the action and of armored Humvees or other military vehicles being hit by roadside bombs.

In some videos, the troops do not appear to have been seriously injured; in one, titled “Sniper Hit” and posted on YouTube by a user named 69souljah, a serviceman is knocked down by a shot but then gets up to seek cover. Other videos, however, show soldiers bleeding on the ground, vehicles exploding and troops being loaded onto medical evacuation helicopters.

At a time when the Bush administration has restricted photographs of the coffins of military personnel returning to the United States and the Pentagon keeps close tabs on videotapes of combat operations taken by the news media, the videos give average Americans a level of access to combat scenes rarely available before, if ever.

Their availability has also produced some backlash. In recent weeks, YouTube has removed dozens of the videos from its archives and suspended the accounts of some users who have posted them, a reaction, it said, to complaints from other users.

More than four dozen videos of combat in Iraq viewed by The New York Times have been removed in recent days, many after The Times began inquiries.

But many others remain, some labeled in Arabic, making them difficult for American users to search for. In addition, new videos, often with the same material that had been deleted elsewhere, are added daily.

Russell K. Terry, a Vietnam veteran who founded the Iraq War Veterans Organization, said he had mixed feelings about the videos.

“It’s unfortunate there’s no way to stop it,” Mr. Terry said, even though “this is what these guys are over there fighting for: freedom of speech.”

One YouTube user, who would not identify himself other than by his account name, facez0fdeath, and his location, in Britain, said by e-mail that he posted a video of a sniper attack “because I felt it was information the U.K. news was unwilling to tell.”

“I was physically sickened upon seeing it,” he said, adding, “I am wholly opposed to any form of censorship.”

The video he posted, which had been viewed more than 33,000 times, was removed earlier this week.

Another YouTube user, who said he was a 19-year-old in Istanbul and who posted more than 40 videos of Iraq violence, said via e-mail that “anti-war feelings and Muslim beliefs (the religion of peace) motivates me.”

Neal O. Newbill, a freshman at the University of Memphis who viewed some of the YouTube videos and posted comments on them, said in an interview that he was enraged by the recorded chants of “Allahu Akbar,” Arabic for “God is great,” that follow some of the sniper attacks.

But Mr. Newbill added that he was awed by the size of the blasts from the improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, used against American vehicles. A son, nephew and grandson of American veterans, Mr. Newbill said he had sought out the videos, searching on YouTube for “I.E.D.,” “because I like watching stuff blow up.”

The Web sites also contain a growing number of video clips taken by American soldiers. One shows the view from the back of a truck containing several members of a platoon, whose vehicle then hits an I.E.D. and is turned on its side. A few videos also show American servicemen or private security guards firing at attackers, and one shows an American rocket-propelled grenade hitting a building from which insurgents are firing.

A spokesman for United States Central Command, which oversees troops in Iraq, said the military was aware of the use of common Internet sites by both insurgent groups and American military personnel.

“Centcom is aware we are facing an adaptive enemy that uses the Internet as a force multiplier and as a means of connectivity,” Maj. Matt McLaughlin, the spokesman, said by e-mail.

While posting of Web logs, pictures and videos by American troops is subject to military regulations, Major McLauglin said, “Al Qaeda uses the Internet and media to foster the perception that they are more capable than they are.”

Some of the videos are obvious propaganda, with Arabic subtitles and accompanying music, while others simply have scenes without sound or graphics. They appear to be real, though the results of attacks are not always clear.

One frequently posted video shows individual photographs of several hundred American soldiers allegedly killed by a Baghdad sniper referred to as Juba. But a television news report from the German weekly Der Spiegel that also has been posted on the video sites shows an interview with one American soldier whom the insurgent group claimed to have killed but whose protective vest stopped the sniper’s bullet.

Geoffrey D. W. Wawro, director of the Center for the Study of Military History at the University of North Texas and a former instructor at the United States Naval War College, said the erosion of the command structure of terrorist and insurgent groups had led them to increase their reliance on the Internet and videos to gain recruits.

American troops, too, have always sent snapshots home from the front, Mr. Wawro said, and digital pictures and video are simply a new incarnation of that.

“This is how the new generation does things,” he said.

“It results in a continued trivialization of combat and its effects,” Mr. Wawro added, “but no one feels completely comfortable saying, Don’t do it.”

YouTube does feel comfortable saying so, however, as does Google Video. Both have user guidelines that prohibit the posting of videos with graphic violence, a measure that spokeswomen for each service said was violated by many of the Iraq videos.

Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, said the company removed videos after they were flagged by users as having inappropriate content and were reviewed by the video service.

In an e-mail message, Ms. Supan said that among the videos removed were those that “display graphic depictions of violence in addition to any war footage (U.S. or other) displayed with intent to shock or disgust, or graphic war footage with implied death (of U.S. troops or otherwise).”

David Gelles and Omar Fekeiki contributed reporting from Berkeley, Calif.

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ABC mistakenly releases ID in page probe

Yahoo! News
ABC mistakenly releases ID in page probe

ABC News' fleeting, inadvertent publishing of a computer screen name enabled a blogger to track down and make public the supposed identity of a former congressional page who traded salacious messages with former Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record).

In breaking the story of the now-burgeoning scandal, the network last Friday posted on its Web site a series of instant message exchanges between Foley and the teen-ager. The name of the page was not included.

But in one exchange the network inadvertently left the victim's screen name on. It was quickly discovered and removed, replaced by a version with the name redacted.

However, ABC said Thursday that a blogger was able to retrieve the deleted file. The blogger, known as "Wild Bill' from the "Passionate America" site, went on a computer detective mission he describes in detail on his site to discover the name.

[Editor's note: Click here to see the blog entry that describes how Wild Bill, with help, tracked down the information.

"To be clear, no one visiting our Web site would have simply stumbled on the old version," ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said. "We thank the blogger and (Matt) Drudge for bringing this to our attention."

ABC has taken additional steps to make sure no one can access the deleted messages, he said.

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Voters say scandals will affect votes

Yahoo! News
Voters say scandals will affect votes
By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press Writer

In yet another hurdle for Republicans, the scandals that have dogged Congress for the past year are prominent in the minds of many voters who say corruption will significantly influence their vote in November.

With midterm elections less than five weeks away, the latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that about half of likely voters say disclosures of corruption and scandal in Congress will be very or extremely important when they enter the voting booth.

About two out of three of those voters said they would cast their ballots for Democrats in House races, further complicating the political landscape for Republicans already struggling against negative public perceptions.

The poll was conducted this week as House Republican leaders came under increasing pressure to explain what they knew of sexually explicit messages from former Rep. Mark Foley of Florida to teenage pages. Last month, another Republican, Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio, admitted that he accepted trips, meals and other gifts in exchange for legislative favors.

In that roiling environment, the poll found that by a margin of nearly 2-to-1 likely voters say Democrats would better combat corruption than Republicans. More troubling to Republicans, likely voters in some key Republican groups were split on whether to trust Democrats or Republicans to clean up corruption.

Voter perceptions about corruption underscore a strong sense of dissatisfaction, if not outright anger, toward Congress. And they help explain the pessimism with which some Republicans in and outside Congress now view their chances on Election Day.

Among likely voters, 28 percent said they are angry at the Republican leadership in Congress and 35 percent said they were dissatisfied but not angry.

Rep. Mike Simpson (news, bio, voting record), R-Idaho, told the Associated Press that Republicans had been somewhat upbeat in early September, believing they would only lose a handful of House seats and still retain their majority. But after Foley's electronic exchanges with teenage boys became public on Friday, Simpson said he now is "not confident" they can keep control of the House.

"From Thursday it went (from) fairly confident we were going to keep the majority to a real tossup," he said.

The Foley scandal, with its proximity to the elections and its simple set of facts, has sent Republican leaders and GOP candidates on a political detour just as they were preparing their final offensive against Democrats to save control of Congress. Since Friday, the Foley affair has broadened amid questions about who in the GOP leadership had been warned about his behavior.

Like other Democrats, Joe Courtney, who is challenging Republican Rep. Rob Simmons of Connecticut, has called for the resignation of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., over the Foley matter. But he said voters raised the subject without prompting during campaign stops last weekend.

"This Congress wasn't exactly held in high regard before this incident," he said. "It has a life of its own."

Lawrence Nuccio, a 78-year-old Republican from Glen Cove, N.Y., said he would vote for Democrats for the first time out of frustration with Republican congressional leaders.

"I'm a registered Republican, but when I turn around and see them trying to cover up — and that's what they're doing — and try to pass the buck to the Democrats, that's not right," Nuccio said. "You have elected officials who are running the country and you assume are doing the right thing, but they're not."

Whether they live in the suburbs or cities or rural areas, likely voters tended to trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle corruption. That didn't necessarily mean they would vote for Democratic candidates, but the results highlighted a vulnerability for Republicans. Even suburban men, traditionally a strong Republican voting bloc, were divided about which party could better address the problem of corruption.

Overall, Democrats maintained a 10-percentage point lead over Republicans in House races. Fifty-one percent of likely voters said they would vote for the Democrat in their congressional district; 41 percent said they would vote for the Republican. That's essentially unchanged from last month.

The number of adults who say the country is on the wrong track remained virtually unchanged from last month at 64 percent. That's still lower than in August, when it was 71 percent or May when it reached 73 percent.

The leading issue among likely voters remained Iraq, followed closely by the economy.

But the poll also found that President Bush's efforts to depict the war in Iraq as part of a larger campaign against terrorism and to portray Democrats as weak on national security was not altering the political landscape.

Approval of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq was at 37 percent among likely voters, down slightly from 41 percent last month. Bush's rating on handling foreign policy and terrorism also fell slightly, from 47 percent last month to 43 percent this month.

Similarly, recent good news on the economic front — from lower gas prices to a rising stock market — did not appear to pierce through the public's downbeat view of the economy. Fifty-six percent of likely voters disapproved of Bush's handling of the economy, compared to 59 percent who held that view last month.

The low approval ratings that have dogged the president and Congress were essentially unchanged from last month. Among likely voters, 24 percent approved of the way Congress was handling its job and 39 percent approved of Bush's job performance.

While many voters aim their antipathy at Republicans, who control Congress, others blame both parties for refusing to work together.

John Hart, a 47-year-old materials manager from Norwalk, Ohio, said he would prefer neither party controlled Congress after next month's elections.

"I've become much more cynical about the whole process just because it's no longer about what's your plans for the good of the country, now it's what can we throw at the other side and avoid getting tossed back at us," he said.

The poll of 741 likely voters was conducted Monday through Wednesday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

___

AP Manager of News Surveys Trevor Tompson and Associated Press Writers Philip Elliott and Kasie Hunt contributed to this report.

___

On the Net:

Ipsos: http://www.ap-ipsosresults.com

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Ex-page says he got messages from Foley

Yahoo! News
Ex-page says he got messages from Foley
By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer

A former congressional page said Thursday he received sexually suggestive messages from then-Rep. Mark Foley in 1997.

Tyson Vivyan's account appears to show the earliest exchange of suggestive messages reported so far between Foley and teens who had served in the Capitol page program. Previous accounts placed the earliest contacts in 2003.

Vivyan, 26, told The Associated Press that Foley began sending him instant messages about a month or two after his nine-month stint as a page ended in June 1997.

Vivyan, who gave interviews this week to other media, said he never met Foley personally during his stint as a page, other than brief greetings while working in the cloakroom beside the House chamber where members take breaks.

A few months later, he said, he started getting instant messages via computer from a person with the screen name MAF54, which has been linked in news reports to Foley. He said he wasn't sure who it was, but the person knew his name and physical description. He said the person asked personal questions, such as his sexual orientation.

Vivyan said he figured the person had to be on Capitol Hill, and began looking up initials in a congressional guide. He said that when he found Foley's initials — MAF, born in 1954 — he realized who it was.

"It was almost surreal. Not only was I conversing with a congressman in a personal manner, I was conversing in a sexual manner," Vivyan said.

After he guessed it was Foley, the person continued to contact him. Vivyan said he tried to turn the talk to politics. Foley would often stop talking and contact him a week later with suggestive messages.

Vivyan also said he was invited to Foley's brownstone in Washington. Vivyan said he didn't want to go alone, so brought a fellow page with him. He said they had pizza and soft drinks, and nothing sexual happened.

David Roth, attorney for the Florida Republican former congressman, declined to comment on the allegations.

Foley, 52, resigned Friday. He has since entered an alcohol rehabilitation facility at an undisclosed location. Through his lawyer, he has said he is gay but denied any sexual contact with minors.

Vivyan said he was nominated as a page by Rep. John. J. Duncan, R-Tenn. Don Walker, Duncan's deputy chief of staff, confirmed Thursday to the AP that Vivyan was a page from Duncan's district.

"We did not get any complaints form him while he was a page or after he was a page or anytime thereafter until Monday," Walker said. "As soon as we learned of it we turned it over to the authorities."

Vivyan said he was interviewed this week by the FBI. FBI spokesman Stephen Emmett in Atlanta declined comment.

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IM conversations can linger for years

Yahoo! News
IM conversations can linger for years
By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer

Instant-messaging conversations, though quick, aren't always fleeting.

Rep. Mark Foley's salacious chats with teenage pages emerged along with e-mails last week, as the Florida Republican abruptly resigned. ABC News, which broke the story, has said former pages were the source of the revelations about IMs from 2003.

Most likely, the pages who corresponded with Foley either manually saved messages or used IM software with built-in logging capabilities, allowing time-stamped chat sessions to be kept indefinitely on one's computer. The programs vary in whether the features are initially on or off and how well they notify users.

"Computers are really, really good at saving things, unlike a dumb telephone," said Richard M. Smith, an Internet security and privacy consultant at Boston Software Forensics. "If you don't want something to get out, don't put it in any computer form at all."

Chat programs from Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are among those with logging capabilities. Microsoft's installs with the "off" button initially selected, while Yahoo's automatically records chats but clears them when a user signs off (users can choose to turn it off or record forever).

AOL Instant Messenger, the most popular IM service in the United States, doesn't offer logging in its current consumer versions but does in its business-oriented AIM Pro software. AOL's service also can be accessed by Trillian and other third-party software with built-in logging.

Computer-indexing programs such as Google Desktop also have options to retain chats on a personal computer. Some computers also may have keystroke-recording programs secretly installed by a boss or a spouse.

In some cases, the services themselves retain chats.

Google Inc. offers users the ability to store such conversations online, so they can be accessed just like e-mail. You need a password to see conversations, although Google and other service providers typically disclose such information to law enforcement when issued a subpoena or court order.

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft all say they do not retain chat sessions at all. Once a message is sent, it should exist only on the sender's and recipient's computer.

The Foley investigation comes as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales seeks a federal law requiring that Internet providers preserve customer records, asserting that prosecutors need them to fight child pornography. However, Justice officials have said that any proposal would not call for the content of IM and other communications to be preserved.

Some employers have software in place to record traffic through their networks, and some business-grade IM systems have centralized logging.

Conversations may also remain on Foley's home or work computers, even if he did not have automated logging. Some computers temporarily store their memory's contents on the disk drive, but the data could take awhile to get overwritten, said Kristin Nimsger, vice president of legal technologies with Kroll Inc.'s Kroll Ontrack.

"Delete does not mean delete, and a hard drive by its very function is going to retain all sorts of information about a person's computer that they may not be aware of," she said.

The Justice Department has ordered House officials to preserve all records in the case.

The tougher part may be proving the messages' authenticity, particularly when the evidence comes from the recipients. Logs are generally plain text files that can be easily altered.

Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department computer crimes prosecutor, said prosecutors must also prove that Foley was on the other end, not someone else using his IM account.

"We've got to prove that the instant-messaging session occurred and that Foley's hands ... (were) on his keyboard," Rasch said.

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Aide says he reported Foley to Hastert 3 years ago

Yahoo! News
Aide says he reported Foley 3 years ago
By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer

A senior congressional aide said Wednesday he told House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office about worrisome conduct by Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record) toward teenage pages more than three years ago, long before officials have acknowledged becoming aware of the issue.

Kirk Fordham made his comments to The Associated Press in an interview as a Kentucky Republican canceled a campaign fundraising event with Hastert. Rep. Ron Lewis (news, bio, voting record) said he wants to know the facts behind a scandal that has roiled Republicans since last week.

"I'm taking the speaker's words at face value," Lewis said in an interview. "I have no reason to doubt him. But until this is cleared up, I want to know the facts.

"If anyone in our leadership has done anything wrong, then I will be the first in line to condemn it."

Taken together, the comments by Fordham and the actions by Lewis added to the political uncertainty surrounding Hastert and fellow Republicans five weeks before midterm elections in which their control of the House will be tested.

Hastert's office did not immediately respond to either development.

Foley, 52, a Florida Republican, resigned last Friday after he was confronted with sexually explicit electronic messages he had sent teenage male pages. He has since entered an alcohol rehabilitation facility at an undisclosed location and, through his lawyer, has denied having had any sexual contact with minors.

His abrupt departure left behind a virtual sex scandal and a string of unanswered questions — about what senior lawmakers knew, when they learned and what they did about it.

Fordham said he was serving as Foley's chief of staff when he was told about the lawmaker's inappropriate behavior toward pages more than three years ago. He said he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene" at the time.

Fordham declined to identify the officials in Hastert's office he spoke with.

Two members of the GOP leadership say they told Hastert this past spring they had heard Foley had sent overly friendly e-mails to a page. Hastert said over the weekend he does not recall those conversations, but has not disputed they took place.

Fordham resigned Wednesday as chief of staff to Rep. Thomas Reynolds (news, bio, voting record), R-N.Y., and said: "I never attempted to prevent any inquiries or investigation."

He said he would fully disclose to the FBI and the House ethics committee "any and all meetings and phone calls" regarding Foley's behavior that he had with senior staffers in the House leadership.

Fordham said one staffer he spoke with remains employed by a senior House Republican leader, but he declined to identify the person.

"Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005," Fordham said.

At the time of his resignation, Fordham was serving as chief of staff for Reynolds, a member of the GOP leadership who has struggled to avoid political damage in the scandal's fallout.

Lewis, the Kentucky congressman, had arranged for Hastert to appear at a $50-per-person fundraiser next Tuesday. Hastert is one of the GOP's most sought-after speaker for campaign events, and the decision to scrap the appearance reflected concern over sharing a stage with a man suddenly struggling with a scandal.

State and federal investigators swung into action.

The Justice Department ordered House officials to "preserve all records" related to Foley's electronic correspondence with teenagers. Acting U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor for the District of Columbia sought protection of the records in a three-page letter to House counsel Geraldine Gennet, according to a Justice official speaking on condition of anonymity.

Such letters often are followed by search warrants and subpoenas and signal that investigators are moving closer to a criminal investigation.

The request was aimed at averting a conflict with the House similar to a standoff in May when FBI agents raided Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson (news, bio, voting record)'s office seeking information in a bribery investigation.

FBI agents have begun interviewing participants in the House page program, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. The official declined to say whether the interviews were limited to current pages or included former pages.

Separately, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed that it has begun its own preliminary inquiry.

___

Associated Press writers Andrew Taylor, Lara Jakes Jordan and Laurie Kellman in Washington; Marus Kabel in Springfield, Mo., and Michelle Smith in Providence, R.I., contributed to this report

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Good Night, and Good Luck

Huffington Post
Frank Dwyer
Good Night, and Good Luck

In an important, though distressing, post a few hours ago, Jeff Cohen warned us that Keith Olbermann may be in trouble. Given the politics and history of Olbermann's bosses at NBC/GE, how much longer will they allow him to have a platform? His show could be canceled.

If that happens, my wife and I will cheerfully add NBC (and MSNBC) to our list of blocked channels.

It's surprising how easy and fulfilling that is: we're doing fine without swiftboat ABC. I hope many of you will join us. If they act like FOX, let them enjoy FOX ratings.

As for Olbermann, I have a suggestion about his future.

He's a brilliant, eloquent, quick-witted, fearless progressive. (How many other Democratic leaders deserve all--or any--of those adjectives?) His passion, clarity, and force make him a hero in a time singularly lacking in heroes. He's become a true leader, a spokesperson for the righteous indignation of the decent, for the hope of the afflicted,
for the conscience of America, for the liberal movement.

GORE-OLBERMANN in 2008.

Why not? Why not select a national leader with such qualifications? Some will point out that he has no experience as a politician. Is that really such a disadvantage, especially given his manifest excellence? Isn't it time we used a wider net to choose our leaders, since our old net is clearly beyond repair?

GORE-OLBERMANN. Why not have a ticket with two heroes?

Imagine the campaign: saving the planet, saving the democracy, saving the middle class, saving the poor, having allies again. Not being ashamed of your leaders. Being proud of them!

Imagine the vice-presidential debate.

Morning is apparently inevitable now, after a very bad night, though how could morning following night have come to be such a close call? So "Good night, and good luck," and then "Good morning!"--and let's begin making our own luck. We're citizens. It's a democracy. It's about time.

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Auditors: Health records for millions at risk of improper disclosure

USA TODAY
Auditors: Health records for millions at risk of improper disclosure

WASHINGTON (AP) — Security weaknesses have left millions of elderly, disabled and poor Americans vulnerable to unauthorized disclosure of their medical and personal records, federal investigators said Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office said it discovered 47 weaknesses in the computer system used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to send and receive bills and to communicate with health care providers.

The agency oversees health care programs that benefit one in every four Americans. Its massive amount of data is transmitted through a computer network that is privately owned and operated.

However, CMS did not always ensure that its contractor followed the agency's security policies and standards, according to the GAO report released Tuesday.

"As a result, sensitive, personally identifiable medical data traversing this network are vulnerable to unauthorized disclosure," the federal investigators said. "And these weaknesses could lead to disruptions in CMS operations."

Mark McClellan, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the agency was working to address problems cited in the report but noted the GAO "found no evidence that confidential or sensitive information had actually been compromised."

"Security of our beneficiaries' data is paramount and we appreciate GAO's assistance in identifying important opportunities for the contractor to strengthen network security," he said.

In the past year, security breaches have led to closer scrutiny of how government agencies maintain sensitive information about the people they serve. The most notable example was the theft of a laptop computer from a Veterans Affairs employee, which contained personal data on about 26.5 million people. The laptop was later recovered. Its contents had not been accessed or copied.

But the theft put a scare into many veterans and prompted calls for major changes in how government records with personal information are secured.

The network handling Medicare claims transmits extremely personal information, such as a patient's diagnosis, the types of drugs the patient takes, plus the type of treatment facility they visited, including treatment centers for substance abuse or mental illness.

In addition, claims data contains personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers, addresses and dates of birth, the investigators said.

The investigators and CMS emphasized that the report focuses solely on the transmission of data. The auditors did not evaluate security controls for the servers used to store patient data.

That's an important distinction because "intercepting or compromising information during transit across the network would be difficult," McClellan said.

Still, auditors at the GAO had previously reported this year that the Department of Health and Human Services had "significant weaknesses" when it came to the security of its computer systems.

The report does not name the contractor that oversees the data transmissions.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, expressed dismay over the audit's findings and said Medicare and Medicaid officials need to respond quickly.

"Program officials need to get on top of these shortcomings immediately," said Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. "Beneficiaries and providers expect that sensitive health information is protected, and it's up to the agency officials to ensure the system is secure."

According to the audit, other weaknesses included:

•Inadequate ability to identify and authenticate the users managing the network.

•Insufficient control of network access and privileges.

•Inadequate controls to protect the network from external attacks.

•Inadequate audit trails to determine the source of any transaction within the network.

CMS officials said they have already corrected 22 of the 47 weaknesses cited by auditors. Another 19 weaknesses were scheduled to be resolved soon, and the remaining six were under review to determine what additional resources were needed.


Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-10-03-records-audit_x.htm?csp=34

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In Military Spending Bill’s Fine Print: Millions to Celebrate Victory

The New York Times
In Bill’s Fine Print, Millions to Celebrate Victory
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — Even as the Bush administration urges Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Republicans in Congress have put down a quiet marker in the apparent hope that V-I Day might be only months away.

Tucked away in fine print in the military spending bill for this past year was a lump sum of $20 million to pay for a celebration in the nation’s capital “for commemoration of success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the money was not spent.

Now Congressional Republicans are saying, in effect, maybe next year. A paragraph written into spending legislation and approved by the Senate and House allows the $20 million to be rolled over into 2007.

The original legislation empowered the president to designate “a day of celebration” to commemorate the success of the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to “issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe that day with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

The celebration would honor the soldiers, sailors, air crews and marines who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would be held in Washington, with the $20 million to cover the costs of military participation.

Democrats called attention to the measure, an act that Republicans are likely to portray as an effort to embarrass them five weeks before the midterm election. The Democrats said both the original language and the extension were pushed by Senate Republicans. A spokesman for the Republican-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee said it was protocol not to identify sponsors of such specific legislation.

The overall legislation was approved in the Senate by unanimous consent and overwhelmingly in the House after a short debate.

Democrats nevertheless said they were not pleased.

“If the Bush administration had spent more time planning for the postwar occupation of Iraq, and less time planning ‘mission accomplished’ victory celebrations, America would be closer to finishing the job in Iraq,” said Rebecca M. Kirszner, communications director for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

Lt. Col. Brian Maka, a Pentagon spokesman, said late Tuesday that the event was envisioned as an opportunity for “honoring returning U.S. forces at the conclusion” of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. “As the funds were not used in F.Y. 2006,” the official said, using the initials for fiscal year, “the authorization was rolled over into F.Y. 2007.”

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Call for action on climate change

BBC NEWS
Call for action on climate change

The world must act now to curb climate change, as doing nothing will cost more long-term, UK officials have said.

British government scientist and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said pursuing alternative energy made economic and environmental sense.

He was addressing a closed-door meeting in Mexico of representatives of 20 of the world's most-polluting nations.

The two-day gathering hopes to reach agreement on ways to meet future energy demands while cutting emissions.

The meeting in Monterrey is the latest round of talks on the climate action plan decided upon at the G8 Gleneagles Summit last year.

Ministers from G8 nations are joined at the event by representatives from the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

Organisers hope the meeting will be able to make progress on a number of issues, including:


* economic challenges of tackling climate change
* alternative low-carbon technologies
* level of investment from public and private sectors
* "road map" for a low-carbon future

'Not optimistic'

British Environment Secretary David Miliband quoted findings reached by Mr Stern in his report, which was commissioned by the UK government.

"He shows that the longer action is delayed, the more expensive it is," Mr Miliband said.

"What he says is that... it is imperative we take action to prevent further climate change because the economic costs - never mind the human costs and the costs to the environment - will far outweigh the costs of mitigation."

Also at the meeting, Claude Mandil, head of the International Energy Agency (IEA), presented the findings of extensive research carried out by the agency.

Mr Mandil told the BBC that the technologies needed to cut emissions for the foreseeable future already exist.

However, he warned that investment in new low-carbon technologies was needed now - otherwise a fresh generation of inefficient, carbon intensive power stations would become locked into the global energy mix.

But he said that he was not optimistic that there was a political will to deliver the necessary support, and that there was "a huge gap between words and deeds".

Costing the Earth

The Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development was created by the UK when it held the presidency of the G8 in 2005.

One of the dialogue's aims was to attempt to reach an informal agreement between industrialised and developing nations on a long-term strategy to cut emissions.

The world's biggest polluter, the US, has not ratified the UN's Kyoto Protocol - the international agreement on reducing nations' greenhouse gas emissions.

President Bush rejected it, saying it would harm the US economy and fail to deliver any meaningful reductions.

Emerging economies, led by China, argued that if the world's richest nation was not part of the Kyoto targets, it was unfair to expect developing nations to be subject to legally binding limits.

Campaigners hope the Sir Nicholas' findings will help deliver a consensus among the big polluters.

"We are urging the G8 not to miss another opportunity to take action in favour of the poorest people of the world, who are already struggling to cope with the effects of climate change," said Rachel Roach, a climate change policy adviser for the aid charity Tearfund.

But she added: "Unfortunately, it may well be that this week's meeting is another case of lots of talk but little action."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/5398784.stm

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New Paltz board: Impeach Bush

Poughkeepsie Journal
New Paltz board: Impeach Bush
By Alice Hunt

NEW PALTZ — Impeach Bush? Yes, says the New Paltz town board.

The board voted 5-0 last week in favor of a resolution calling for the impeachment of the president. Grounds for impeachment listed in the resolution were taken from a list of 13 legal violations compiled by groups who also support Bush's impeachment.

"I'd say it's an unfortunate time in our history that we have to do this," Councilman Jim Bacon said.

While a majority vote in the U.S. House of Representatives is required to initiate a trial and a two-thirds vote by members present in the U.S. Senate is necessary for a president's removal from office, town resident Bob Hughes said the resolution sends a message to those at the state and federal levels.

"It becomes collective with the growing number of resolutions," he said. "It brings nationwide attention to the legal actions possible."

Hughes had presented the resolution to the board.

Sixteen state political action committees and 24 cities and towns across the United States have approved the resolution.

In New York, the Town of Woodstock, the City of Plattsburgh and Village of New Paltz have all passed similar resolutions.

All members of the New Paltz town board are Democrats.

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Man Sues Secret Service Agent Over Arrest After Approaching Cheney and Denouncing War

The New York Times
Man Sues Secret Service Agent Over Arrest After Approaching Cheney and Denouncing War
By KIRK JOHNSON

DENVER, Oct. 3 — A Colorado man who was arrested in June on harassment charges after he approached Vice President Dick Cheney to denounce the war in Iraq filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday accusing a Secret Service agent of civil rights violations.

In his suit, filed in Federal District Court in Denver, the man, Steven Howards, an environmental consultant who lives in Golden, Colo., says he stepped up to the vice president to speak his mind in a public place and found himself in handcuffs — in violation, the suit says, of the Constitution’s language about free speech and illegal search and seizure.

The suit seeks no specific damages, and names only one agent, Virgil D. Reichle Jr., who is assigned to the Denver office of the Secret Service. But Mr. Howards’s lawyer, David A. Lane, said Mr. Cheney might be called as a witness, along with the district attorney in Eagle County who threw out the criminal case against Mr. Howards. If a chain of command within the Secret Service is found that suggests Mr. Reichle was acting on orders, Mr. Lane said, more defendants could be named.

A call to Agent Reichle was not returned. A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney referred questions on the matter to the Secret Service. The agent in charge of the Denver office, Lon Garner, declined to comment.

Mr. Howards, 54, said at a news conference here that he was taking his 8-year-old son to a piano lesson on June 16 at the Beaver Creek Resort about two hours west of Denver when he saw Mr. Cheney at an outdoor mall. Mr. Howards said he approached within two feet of Mr. Cheney and said in a calm voice, “I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible,” or as the lawsuit itself describes the encounter, “words to that effect.”

Mr. Howards said he then went on his way. About 10 minutes later, he said, he was walking back through the area when Agent Reichle handcuffed him and said he would be charged with assaulting the vice president. Local police officers, acting on information from the Secret Service, according to the suit, ultimately filed misdemeanor harassment charges that could have resulted in up to a year in jail.

A June 16 article in The Vail Daily quoted a spokesman for the Secret Service, Eric Zahren, as saying that Mr. Howards “wasn’t acting like other folks in the area,” and that he became “argumentative and combative” when agents tried to question him. Mr. Howards said Tuesday that he was never threatening and did not become upset until his arrest.

“This was not about anything I did — this is about what I said,” he said.

Mr. Zahren declined to comment on the suit or on his original description of the event.

Mr. Howards said he was released on $500 bond after about three hours in jail. A state judge dismissed the charge about three weeks later at the request of the Eagle County district attorney, Mark Hurlbert.

“It was our understanding that the vice president did not want to prosecute,” Mr. Hurlbert said in a telephone interview. “The original indication was that he had pushed the vice president. Later it looked to be that he had just spoken to him.”

Mr. Hurlbert said the initial information on the incident came from the Secret Service agents at Beaver Creek. A later communication from Mr. Cheney’s office or the Secret Service — Mr. Hurlbert said he did not remember which — said the government wanted to drop the matter.

The suit joins two others — in West Virginia and another in Denver — charging that Secret Service agents or White House staff members violated the law in keeping people with opposing political views away from President Bush or Mr. Cheney.

In the other Colorado suit, two people said they were ejected from a taxpayer-financed appearance by Mr. Bush in Denver in March 2005 because of an antiwar bumper sticker. The case is awaiting a ruling from the judge on a motion by the government to dismiss the case.

In the West Virginia case, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of Jeff and Nicole Rank, who said they were arrested on July 4, 2004, at an appearance by Mr. Bush in Charleston. The Ranks had proper tickets but were wearing anti-Bush T-shirts, the suit says. The government has an Oct. 10 deadline to respond to the suit, said Chris Hansen, a senior staff counsel at the A.C.L.U. in New York.

Mr. Howards said that he had had no intent to test the limits of free speech when he approached Mr. Cheney, but that the government’s actions in the aftermath only deepened his convictions and opposition.

“This administration has a history of intimidating folks,” he said.

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Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.

The New York Times
Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S.
By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 — A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.

Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.

Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

A $2.4 million grant will finance the research over three years.

American officials have long relied on newspapers and other news sources to track events and opinions here and abroad, a goal that has included the routine translation of articles from many foreign publications and news services.

The new software would allow much more rapid and comprehensive monitoring of the global news media, as the Homeland Security Department and, perhaps, intelligence agencies look “to identify common patterns from numerous sources of information which might be indicative of potential threats to the nation,” a statement by the department said.

It could take several years for such a monitoring system to be in place, said Joe Kielman, coordinator of the research effort. The monitoring would not extend to United States news, Mr. Kielman said.

“We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,” he said.

Even the basic research has raised concern among journalism advocates and privacy groups, as well as representatives of the foreign news media.

“It is just creepy and Orwellian,” said Lucy Dalglish, a lawyer and former editor who is executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Andrei Sitov, Washington bureau chief of the Itar-Tass news agency of Russia, said he hoped that the objective did not go beyond simply identifying threats to efforts to stifle criticism about an American president or administration.

“This is what makes your country great, the open society where people can criticize their own government,” Mr. Sitov said.

The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.

The software would need to be able to distinguish between statements like “this spaghetti is good” and “this spaghetti is not very good — it’s excellent,” said Claire T. Cardie, a professor of computer science at Cornell.

Professor Cardie ranked the second statement as a more intense positive opinion than the first.

The articles in the database include work from many American newspapers and news wire services, including The Miami Herald and The New York Times, as well as foreign sources like Agence France-Presse and The Dawn, a newspaper in Pakistan.

One article discusses how a rabid fox bit a grazing cow in Romania, hardly a threat to the United States. Another item, an editorial in response to Mr. Bush’s use in 2002 of “axis of evil” to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, said: “The U.S. is the first nation to have developed nuclear weapons. Moreover, the U.S. is the first and only nation ever to deploy such weapons.”

The approach, called natural language processing, has been under development for decades. It is widely used to summarize basic facts in a text or to create abridged versions of articles.

But interpreting and rating expressions of opinion, without making too many errors, has been much more challenging, said Professor Cardie and Janyce M. Wiebe, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. Their system would include a confidence rating for each “opinion” that it evaluates and would allow an official to refer quickly to the actual text that the computer indicates contains an intense anti-American statement.

Ultimately, the government could in a semiautomated way track a statement by specific individuals abroad or track reports by particular foreign news outlets or journalists, rating comments about American policies or officials.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said the effort recalled the aborted 2002 push by a Defense Department agency to develop a tracking system called Total Information Awareness that was intended to detect terrorists by analyzing troves of information.

“That is really chilling,” Mr. Rotenberg said. “And it seems far afield from the mission of homeland security.”

Federal law prohibits the Homeland Security Department or other intelligence agencies from building such a database on American citizens, and no effort would be made to do that, a spokesman for the department, Christopher Kelly, said. But there would be no such restrictions on using foreign news media, Mr. Kelly said.

Mr. Kielman, the project coordinator, said questions on using the software were premature because the department was just now financing the basic research necessary to set up an operating system.

Professors Cardie and Wiebe said they understood that there were legitimate questions about the ultimate use of their software.

“There has to be guidelines and restrictions on the use of this kind of technology by the government,” Professor Wiebe said. “But it doesn’t mean it is not useful. It can just as easily help the government understand what is going on in places around the world.”

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Dean: "It's time for the truth."

Dean Responds to Latest Bush Election Year Rhetoric

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, President Bush again engaged in misleading partisan attacks, by falsely asserting that Democrats have a "softer side" when it comes to fighting terrorism. Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean issued the following statement responding to President Bush's latest failed, stay-the-course rhetoric:

"What's softer than giving up the hunt for Osama bin Laden and ignoring the 16 intelligence agencies who told him that the war in Iraq is making us less safe at home and around the world? It's time for the truth.

All the tough talk in the world cannot hide the fact that President Bush and his GOP Congress's bad decisions have hurt America's security."

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Actors, musicians oppose U.S. media consolidation

Reuters
Actors, musicians oppose U.S. media consolidation
By Jeremy Pelofsky

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Hollywood actors, producers and musicians on Tuesday crowded into a Federal Communications Commission hearing to clamor for the retention of curbs on the growth and power of big media conglomerates.

The five FCC commissioners, who are considering overhauling ownership limits, found themselves center stage as participants, ranging from Mike Mills, bassist for the rock band R.E.M., to "Rockford Files" producer Stephen Cannell, criticized media mergers they said were drowning out independent voices.

Producers described difficulties getting shows on television networks unless they accepted demands to change actors or storylines. They urged the FCC to require that 25 percent of primetime programming come from independent producers.

"Casting decisions are now made by the networks," said actress Anne-Marie Johnson, who has appeared on popular TV shows like "Melrose Place" and "JAG".

"A requirement for independent voices in production is critical to the completion of a goal of diversity in America," Johnson said during an event that at times sounded like a raucous political rally against media consolidation.

The FCC is reviewing whether broadcasters can be allowed to own more television and radio stations in a specific market, and whether to lift a ban preventing a company from owning a newspaper and a broadcast outlet in a market.

Another rule under review is a ban preventing two of the four major networks from combining.

Marshall Herskovitz, president of the Producers Guild of America, said that given television stations' demands for profits, news editors have to choose between segments that are newsworthy and those that are more "marketable".

BROADCASTERS ARGUE COMPETITION BOOMING

Broadcasters argue that there are plenty of outlets for local news, entertainment and information thanks to cable television, the Internet and other providers.

"Media competition today is far more intense than at any time in history," said Bruce Owen, a professor at Stanford University and a representative for three of the broadcast networks, CBS, Fox and NBC.

The general manager of a Los Angeles television station owned by the Tribune Co., which also owns the Los Angeles Times newspaper and advocates lifting the cross-ownership ban of broadcast outlets and newspapers, said the community has benefited from the dual ownership.

"We do have the enormous reporting capabilities of the L.A. Times and we use that asset to complement, augment and enrich our local news telecasts," said Vincent Malcolm of KTLA, which is an affiliate of the new CW network.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin gave no hints at the hearing about his own views.

"The decisions we will make about our ownership rules will be as difficult as they are critical," said Martin, a Republican. "We must also recognize, though, that some of our rules have not been updated for years and may no longer reflect the current marketplace."

The FCC in 2003 tried to lift the common-ownership ban and permit companies to own more TV stations in a market. However, an appeals court in 2004 sent the agency back to the drawing board, ruling that the limits were not adequately justified.

Martin, who will lead the crafting of the initial proposal of changes to the rules with his staff, has previously expressed a general desire to lift the ban on common-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets.

He must get at least two of the other commissioners to agree with his plans for the move to pass and address concerns outlined by the appeals court that put the limits on hold. The agency is divided 3-2 in favor of the Republicans.

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