Democrats to raise wages for poor workers

Reuters
Democrats to raise wages for poor workers
By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The incoming Democratic-led U.S. Congress intends to give a hand to dishwashers, fast-food cooks and America's other poorest-paid workers by raising the federal minimum wage for the first time in a decade.

With the gap between rich and poor widening, Democrats promised such a pay hike as a part of their campaign that saw them win control of both chambers of Congress in the November 7 elections from President George W. Bush's Republicans.

With the new 110th Congress set to convene on January 4, Democrats vow a vote soon on a bill to raise the minimum wage over two years to $7.25 per hour from $5.15 per hour. And they seem positioned to make the popular measure law.

"This is a moral issue, as well as an issue of economic fairness and justice," said Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who will be the House of Representatives' Democratic majority leader.

"No one can meet even the most basic expenses on today's minimum wages," said Rep. George Miller, a California Democrat who will chair the labor committee in the House of Representatives.

Republicans have long blocked an increase, but in the aftermath of last month's election may no longer have the will or the votes. Yet they will try to attach to such a bill a tax break for small business to help offset it.

"I suspect there'll be a minimum wage increase but I'm hoping there'll be some tax relief to lessen the blow," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican.

Traditional allies of corporate America, Republicans cite studies that show an increase in the minimum wage would hurt small business and reduce the number of entry-level jobs.

Democrats, who draw support from organized labor, point to studies that conclude a modest increase would cause no significant job loss. They also cite a recent survey that found most small business owners believe it would not hurt them. In fact, most small businesses already pay above the minimum wage.

Democrats argue that a pay hike is long overdue for minimum-wage workers. They include dishwashers, short-order cooks, farm workers, ushers, baggage porters. Some are teenagers. Others are high-school dropouts, immigrants and single parents.

"I think a minimum-wage bill -- pretty much a Democratic document without a lot of extras to placate Republicans and their small-business allies -- will pass, hit the president's desk and he'll sign it," said Ethan Siegal of the Washington Exchange, a private group that tracks Congress for institutional investors.

"Most people believe it is the right thing to do, and if Washington politicians don't do it, they'll look like elitists," Siegal said.

At $5.15 per hour, a person working 40 hours per week makes $10,712 per year, about $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three.

There are varying estimates on who how many people in the United States receive the minimum wage. According to federal statistics, in 2005, the latest year figures are available, there were an estimated 479,000. But millions of others are paid just a dollar or two more, with many of them also living in poverty.

In addition to raising the pay of people who now earn less than $7.25 per hour, the proposed new minimum wage, an increase would prompt employers to increase the wages of an estimated 8.3 million other low-paid workers, according to some estimates.

"There's a spillover effect," said Harry Holzer, a former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department. "Some employers like to stay a buck or two above the minimum."

The federal minimum wage was established in 1938. There are exemptions, such as for those employed by small businesses with annual revenue of less than $500,000 that do not engage in interstate commerce.

With the current minimum wage having gone into effect on September 1, 1997, this is the longest period ever without a boost. Lawmakers have a personal incentive to now go along it.

Until there is one, Democrats vow to prevent any pay raise for members of Congress, who have increased their own salaries eight times and 24 percent since 1997 to $165,200 a year.

In the past, Republicans have repeatedly stopped an increase in the minimum wage by attaching to it "poison pills," amendments denounced by Democrats as unacceptable.

These amendments have included a variety of tax breaks, such as measures that would couple tax cuts for small business with tax relief for the rich and even one that Democrats complained would have cut the pay in some states of workers who receive tips.

Democrats aim to get a bill through Congress without amendments, though they may later consider tax relief for small business in separate legislation.

Senate Republicans could try to block a minimum-wage increase with a procedural roadblock. But Democrats don't believe they would try -- given the host of groups that back the measure, including religious leaders combating poverty.

"We don't think we have to give Republicans much of anything," said a senior Senate Democratic aide. "They can't afford to stop this."

(additional reporting by Richard Cowan)

(For other stories in the Minimum Wage series, go to http://today.reuters.com/News/GlobalCoverageEx.aspx?type=minimumwage&src=GC_minimumwage_kobra)

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Time Person Of The Year: The Republican Party, Which Impeached Bill Clinton For Nothing, Then Gave Us This

Huffington Post
Brent Budowsky
Time Person Of The Year: The Republican Party, Which Impeached Bill Clinton For Nothing, Then Gave Us This

The President, with approval from Republicans in Congress, misrepresented intelligence to drive our country to war, with fear, while the Republicans in Congress, protecting him, covered up the report that would expose it.

The President, ignoring the advice of generals and demeaning those who courageously tried to warn us, with support and silence by the Republicans in Congress, approved a war plan that began with grotesque miscalculation, was
conducted with war on the cheap, used troops like the toy soldiers of ideologues. and risked their safety as the petty cash of their partisan politics.

The President, cheered by the throngs of the one party Republican Congress, instituted an Iraq Reconstruction with the Proconsul he named, staffed that Reconstruction with Republican campaign operatives, stiffed that Reconstruction with war profiteers of gargantuan greed, who stuffed their pockets with taxpayers money while our troops shed their blood in patriotism, and the Republican Congress shed their responsibility for oversight, one of the great derelictions of duty in history.

The President, under the spell of a Vice President who began this war as the Stone Age advocate for torture, and now advocates making catastrophe more catastrophic by intervening on one side of a civil war they say does not exist, with Republicans in Congress who tiptoed through the tulips straight through the eve of this destruction, are on the brink of doing more of the very failures that have taken us to this point.

The President, with White House counsels and Attorney Generals who were accessories to the crimes, with Republicans in Congress who stood supplicant and submissive while he publicly claimed he had the sole power to violate the Constitution, publicly claimed the sole power to violate laws he had signed, publicly claimed he was the sole determinant of whether he should faithfully execute the laws of the land, and publicly charged that those who opposed this were less than patriotic.

The Republican Leader Delay, with the smiling support of the President, with the leering smirk of the political aide who embodies the politics of retribution and dirt, with the full support of the Republican leaders of House and Senate who lead their party even today, instituted the greatest racketeering operation in the history of free nations, known as the K Street Project, engineered one of the great political scandals of our or any age, and huddle nervously today, fearing scales of justice that still await them.

The Republican White House, with the standing ovation of Republicans in Congress, hold secret meetings in their basement, with profiteers who dripped with oil, flowed with money, and gave so generously to their Party while they cheated our people, and made side deals with despots who funnel their money to terrorists, while they plan more attacks on our country.

The Republican President surrounded by war drunk ideologues obsessively planing to drive our country to more and greater wars, with the support of Republicans in Congress, refused to give our troops the armor, vehicles, bandages and helmets it was their duty to provide, then refused to give Democrats the opportunity for honest votes to set things right, then used war itself as a partisan instrument, with lies spread against heroes, who stood in opposition to catastrophe.

The Republican Speaker, the Republicans in Congress, the Republican President, stood united as one in coverup, even when sick and perverted crimes were committed against the young congressional pages, by the man who led the caucus designed to protect the children.

Our Republican President and Republican Speaker had their arms around each other in mutual support, even on these demented abuses.

This list could continue almost indefinitely, to make my point, but need not here, except for this: as the selection committee makes its decision for Time's person of the year there are rightful fears of future investigations, future revelations, future indictment, future conviction at every Republican level of the Republican Administration, Republicans in Congress, and Republican donors who gave dirty money to protect themselves in Republican Washington.

This is the party that impeached Bill Clinton for nothing?

My point is this: America may well be enduring what historicans will call the worst president in American history and the worst Vice President in American history.

America will continue to endure the war so arrogantly and incompetently planned by the man historians may well call the worst Secretary of Defense in American history.

America has had to endure the vacation-like schedule, massive corruptions and failures of duty of a Republican Congress that the historians may well conclude was the worst Congress in American history, a dishonor of some magnitude.

America has had to endure a corrupted politics and a Republican National Committee that ran racist and bigoted ads, with dirty money, from corrupted sources, who have hired armies of criminal lawyers and Washington firms that specialize in defending guilty clients, fearing catastrophic investigations.

If the Time Magazine Person of the Year should name the greatest influence on our country and our world, it is the Republican President, the Republican Vice President, the Republican White House political office, the Republican National Committee, the Republican Senate, the Republican House, the Republican donors, the Republican oil companies, the Republican profiteers in Iraq, the Republican White House counsels who said the wrongs were right, the Republican Attorney Generals who failed to stand up for faithfully executing the laws and for preserving, protecting and defending our Constitution.

What is so extraordinary, with results that are so catastrophic as witnessed every night on our evening news, is this: it was one political party that controlled every branch of our government, and sought permanent one party domination of our democracy, that abused one law and practice after another, that made the assassination of character an art form, and the demeaning of our democracy their mission, and they did it, in unison, together.

Who should be Time's Person of the Year?

The party that impeached Bill Clinton for nothing, and gave us this.

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Leahy vows to fight Bush, guard privacy rights

Reuters
Leahy vows to fight Bush, guard privacy rights
By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The incoming Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee promised on Wednesday to combat what he denounced as President George W. Bush's war-time trampling of American rights and laws.

Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont said, if needed, he would seek to subpoena members of the administration to testify at congressional hearings on such matters as stepped-up federal surveillance. Leahy said he might even move to cut off some federal funding or deny Bush confirmation of key nominees.

"The Congress has the ability to make sure ... that the president does what the Constitution requires him to do: to faithfully execute the laws we pass," Leahy said.

"We have ways of doing that between the powers of the purse and, certainly in the Senate, the power of confirmation," Leahy added.

Leahy made the comments after delivering a speech at Georgetown University Law Center where he outlined his agenda for the new Democratic-led Congress set to convene on January 4.

"We have a duty to repair real damage done to our system of government over the last few years," Leahy said in his address.

"This administration has rolled back open government laws and systematically eroded Americans' privacy rights," he added.

"It has brazenly refused to answer the legitimate oversight questions of the public's duly elected representatives, and it has acted outside lawful authority to wiretap Americans without warrants, and to create databanks and dossiers on law-abiding Americans without following the law and without first seeking legal authorization."

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe U.S. agencies intrude on privacy rights in anti-terror probes but are split on whether such tactics are justified.

Leahy and other congressional Democrats have complained about Bush's tactics, particularly the Republican president's warrant-less domestic spying program. Bush says he has the inherent power to order the surveillance to protect the nation.

Democrats have also complained about Bush claiming a right to ignore or not enforce sections of bills that he signs into law if he believes they impinge on his authority or interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

While Republicans controlled Congress in recent years, Democrats have been unable to hold hearing or pass bills to remedy what they see as Bush's overreach.

But having won back Congress in last month's elections, Democrats promise oversight hearings on a number of administration actions, such as the Iraq war.

Democrats also will be positioned to push legislation to change the president's policies, though Bush could veto them.

Leahy said he seeks cooperation, not confrontation.

"I look forward to a new Congress where we work together on behalf of all Americans," Leahy said.

Quoting one of the America's founding fathers, he added: "Benjamin Franklin memorably warned that those who would 'give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.'"

Leahy said: "Freedom and security must not become mutually exclusive values in America. We can have both, and we must have both."

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NY senator charged with fraud over charity funds

Reuters
NY senator charged with fraud over charity funds

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A New York state senator stole $423,000 in charity money to pay for indulgences like a Dominican cigar-making company, authorities said on Tuesday as they announced charges against him.

Between 1999 and 2005 Efrain Gonzalez Jr., 58, directed the state legislature to send grant monies to a Bronx charity, where a friend redirected the funds to a shell charity that was the senator's "conduit for paying personal expenses," the U.S. attorney's office said.

Gonzalez used the money to pay for New York Yankees tickets, jewelry, his daughter's college tuition, clothing, a cigar company in the Dominican Republic as well as member fees to a resort and rent for a luxury apartment there.

In August, Gonzalez pleaded not guilty to spending $37,000 meant for the West Bronx Neighborhood Association Inc., which was nothing more than a room connected to the senator's Bronx district office.

The superseding indictment announced Tuesday also charges three of the Gonzalez' friends with being part of the scheme.

Gonzalez has been charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, theft of federal funds, conspiracy and money laundering. If convicted, Gonzalez, a native of Puerto Rico who was elected to the senate in 1989, faces a maximum of 130 years in prison.

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The Power Of Denial

Huffington Post
Ross M. Levine
Weapon of Last Resort

When it comes to the nuclear option, my dear mother is always prepared to reach into her well-stocked arsenal for her most lethal weapon - denial. No matter what she has said or done, all she has to do is go into denial mode and the battle is over. Her denial is as impenetrable as the walls of Alcatraz, and once it's been deployed, the only option is to retreat to fight another day.

I bring this up because I am of late reminded of the power of denial in the world at large. As you have probably heard, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently held a conference in Tehran on the subject of the Holocaust. In a nutshell (no pun intended), it was an event designed to give expression to the idea that the Holocaust may well be nothing but a myth -- a myth meant to justify the existence of Israel and to give Western powers a moral rationale for supporting her.

Here in the West, Holocaust denial exists on the fringe and is not a sanctioned governmental viewpoint. I can think of few other historical events, other than the Armenian genocide, that have had to wage such a fierce campaign against the power of denial. I've never heard anyone deny that the world wars occurred, or that the Great Depression was real, or that the Pilgrims came over on the Mayflower. Yes, history does get rewritten as perceptions change, but it's usually a change in attitude toward an event as opposed to a denial that the event ever occurred at all.

Consider the virtual extirpation of the Indians from the land east of the Mississippi. Does anyone deny that this occurred? Certainly our viewpoint on it has changed, but to my knowledge, nobody has declared that the phrase "Native American" is a misnomer.

Denial elevates a political debate to another level. Or should we say, lowers it to a level where debate is not possible. The word "debate" infers that two sides are in conflict, and that through this conflict, some kind of truth or understanding may emerge. But denial does not allow for debate. Denial is a position of last resort - it's where all discussion stops. In denying the Holocaust, the deniers force the other side to continually present evidence that what millions of witnesses saw and experienced was real, proof which the deniers simply re-deny. It is doubtful at this point that there will ever be a critical mass of evidence that will at last bring the deniers to acknowledge that six million Jews met their deaths at the hands of the Nazis and their friends.

No, denial is more than simply denial. Or it is simply denial. It's the decision that no matter what evidence is presented, no matter what testimony is produced, truth remains completely relative. And it takes the idea that all truth is relative to its ultimate degree - that no truth is not relative, i.e., that just by believing something, one can make it true.

Or, perhaps better said, that by not believing something, one can make it untrue. Yes, disbelieve and it will become false - that's the denier's mantra.

Which brings us to another denier in our midst, the decider turned denier, George W. Bush. In the face of the Iraq Study Group, all the neo-con think tankers and Republican senators who have abandoned his policies in Iraq, and at least 75% of the American public, George Bush denies that his vision of victory in Iraq is no longer an option. And there seems to be nothing that can enlighten him. Once a leader slips into such an advanced state of denial, convincing him to acknowledge what to the rest of the world is obvious is like convincing a non-Copernican that the world revolves around the sun: there is no end to the evidence, but what the denier sees is what he must believe. If he sees the sun set in the west, then surely the sun is moving, not the earth. If he sees that our forces are battling ragtag Islamic insurgents, then surely they are al Qaeda operatives determined to destroy us. If he sees that to admit he was wrong is to invalidate the concepts of preemptive war and spreading peace via the sword, then he must stand by his folly to the bitter end.

Occasionally, a denier is a person of such vision that their stubborn determination to maintain their own truth is rewarded, sometimes even in their own lifetime. Columbus, the aforementioned Copernicus, Einstein, Martin Luther King - one can call them deniers of a sort. But it is doubtful George Bush can be counted among these. If there were indeed evidence that his Iraq campaign was hurtling toward success, if the Holocaust deniers could indeed produce proof that six million people died of natural causes without any assistance from poison gas, perhaps we could understand their propensity to "just say no." But as it is, these deniers are more pathetic than prophetic.

President Ahmadinejad, six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, so you needn't hold any more conferences. President Bush, "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating," so wake up and smell the blood.

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Breach at UCLA exposes data on 800,000 such as names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, addresses

Breach at UCLA exposes data on 800,000
Jaikumar Vijayan

December 12, 2006 (Computerworld) The University of California, Los Angeles, today began sending out letters to more than 800,000 individuals whose personal information may have been compromised in a database breach that remained undetected for more than a year.

A statement posted on the university's Web site said that intruders appear to have taken advantage of a previously "undetected software flaw" in one of its "hundreds" of software applications to gain access to the restricted database. Attempts to access the database have apparently been going on since October 2005, according to the statement.

The breach was discovered on Nov. 21 this year, when the university's computer security technicians noticed an "exceptionally high volume of suspicious database queries," the statement read. "An emergency investigation indicated that access attempts had been made since October 2005 and that the hacker specifically sought Social Security numbers," said Jim Davis, the university's CIO and associate vice chancellor of IT, in the statement. The FBI was notified of the breach.

The breached database includes the names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth and addresses of current and former faculty, staff and students and, in some cases, the parents of students at the university.

"We deeply regret the concern and inconvenience caused by this illegal activity," Davis was quoted as saying. He added that the university has since "reconstructed and protected" the breached database. He did not specify what measures the university has taken to mitigate the problem.

Although the hacker may have obtained personal information on some of the individuals, there is no evidence that the data has been misused, said Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams in the statement.

University officials could not be reached immediately for further comment.

That the breach remained undetected for more than a year is troubling but not entirely surprising, especially in a university environment, said Andrew Jaquith, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston. There is still a widely held misperception that monitoring and auditing databases for security breaches imposes a "ridiculous penalty on performance," he said. As a result, many organizations fail to keep an eye on their databases and miss breaches of the sort that happened at UCLA, he said.

"I don't think the performance argument carries a lot of weight, but it is an argument that people often use" for defending their decision not to monitor database activity, Jaquith said.

Another problem with database activity auditing is that it can generate huge amounts of data, said Ron Ben-Natan, chief technology officer at Guardium Inc., a vendor of database security products. So people tend to tune it down and use it only to detect certain very specific types of activities, such as privilege escalation, he said. In the process, they could miss other potential security violations, he noted.

The UCLA breach is the largest ever reported by a U.S university, but it is one of many reported by higher-education institutions over the past few years. More than a quarter of the 400 or so data breaches listed on the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse Web site since the ChoicePoint compromise of February 2005 involve a university. The most recent breach listed on the privacy advocacy group's site occurred Dec. 9, when Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond accidentally sent personal information on 561 students as attachments in an e-mail to 195 students informing them of their eligibility for scholarships.

Another university in the news recently for major security lapses is Ohio University, which earlier this year disclosed five separate security breaches, including one that exposed personal information on 137,000 people. As with the recent UCLA breach, one of the holes disclosed by Ohio University went undetected for more than a year. The security lapses at OU led to the resignation of CIO William Sams and the firing of two senior IT staffers.

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Contractor working for the state of Vermont accidentally posted Social Security numbers of hundreds of health care providers

Vermont officials blast contractor for security lapse
Jaikumar Vijayan

December 12, 2006 (Computerworld) A contractor working for the state of Vermont is drawing fire from the commissioner of human resources for accidentally posting the Social Security numbers of hundreds of health care providers on the state's Web site earlier this year.

The incident happened in May and involved The Segal Group Inc., a New York-based firm hired by the state to assist in the bidding process for new health care contracts, according to Commissioner Linda McIntire. As part of its contract, Segal was expected to draft, prepare and issue formal requests for proposals for the state employee health care administrator and mental health care administrator contracts, she said.

In carrying out that task, the company obtained a list of health care providers from Cigna, the state's current health care administrator. The lists, which contained taxpayer identification numbers and in some cases SSNs, were included as attachments for the RFPs and were subsequently posted on the state Web site -- where the information remained for about a month before being removed, McIntire said.

The numbers were not labeled as Social Security numbers but rather as taxpayer identification numbers, which a majority of providers use when submitting claims to Cigna, she said. In some cases, providers used SSNs as identifiers. It was those numbers that were inadvertently exposed, McIntire said.

More than 13,000 names were on the list provided by Cigna,

but only a few hundred of those used SSNs as identifiers, she said.

According to McIntire, the state learned of the potential compromise only last week and began sending out letters to the affected health care providers. Another letter will go out this week informing them of the state's decision to pay for one year's worth of credit-monitoring services for the affected individuals, she said today.

McIntire blasted Segal for the security lapse in a letter sent to the company last week. In the letter, she expressed her "deep dissatisfaction that an expert consultant could overlook the inclusion of Social Security numbers in a document that was to be publicly posted and disseminated to potential bidders." "I assume there is no need to point out to you the sensitivity of Social Security numbers or the harm that may flow from unauthorized access to those numbers," McIntire said in the letter. "We did not expect to encounter this kind of problem as a result of your work."

She went on to ask for Segal's full cooperation in helping the state correct the problem.

In an e-mailed statement, Segal said that the mistake resulted from the difficulty involved in distinguishing SSNs from employer identification numbers (EIN), since both are nine digits.

"The Social Security numbers that were released had been used as provider identifiers in the Cigna database," Segal said in the statement, noting that in most cases, providers used their EINs as identifiers. "This is an unfortunate circumstance. Segal has reached out to the state to help rectify the situation and alleviate any provider concerns."

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Bogus! U.S. agencies target moneymaking scams

Computerworld
Bogus! U.S. agencies target moneymaking scams
Grant Gross

December 12, 2006 (IDG News Service) Three U.S. agencies have initiated more than 100 law enforcement actions against bogus business-opportunity peddlers and work-at-home scams, including several Internet-based schemes.

The Project FAL$E HOPE$ crackdown, announced Tuesday but in operation for most of the year, targeted scammers in 11 states, including California, Texas, Florida and Maryland. The Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Postal Inspection Service worked with law enforcement agencies in those states to take action against the alleged fraudsters.

Project FAL$E HOPE$ includes new cases announced Tuesday, developments in existing cases, criminal convictions, and state actions. The project also announced new education material for advertising sales staff, aimed at helping screen ads for bogus business opportunities.

Included in nine cases the FTC announced Tuesday:

*
The Results Group: Working out of what the FTC called a boiler room in Phoenix, the operation charged between $99 and $599 to build and host Web sites "affiliated" with the sites of large retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Overstock.com, the FTC said. Consumers could supposedly make money when those retailers paid commissions for sales made through the consumers’ Web sites. In fact, the large retailers were unaware of any such affiliation, and consumers made no money.
The FTC accused the operation of falsely representing that purchasers would receive substantial income as well as substantial assistance from an expert staff, and using false and misleading statements to encourage consumers to buy the business opportunity.

*
Money Making Secret: These defendants promised "Top 12 Programs to Make Big Money!" and charged consumers between $47 and $129 to access a "members only" Web site with "money-making secrets," the FTC said. The Internet-based programs that were offered varied, including online survey programs, free government grant money programs, mystery shopper programs, and online data-entry programs.

However, these programs did not exist, or did not offer easy money with little time or effort, as promised, the FTC said. The FTC's complaint charges the defendants with making false and unsubstantiated earnings claims.

The FTC also has new guidance for publishers, offering them help to screen out deceptive ads for business opportunities. The alert, "Ads for Business Opportunities: How to Detect Deception," suggests advertising sales staff to give an extra look at ads that make claims such as: "No risk! Guaranteed" "Quick and Easy!" "Earn $2,000 a month."

The FTC alert warns that legitimate business ventures involve risks, and start-up businesses require a lot of work to get off the ground. The law requires earnings claims in ads be accompanied by the number and percentage of previous purchasers who achieved the income, the FTC said.

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Poll finds Americans more pessimistic on Iraq

Reuters
Poll finds Americans more pessimistic on Iraq

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As President Bush weighs options for changing course in Iraq, Americans are more pessimistic on the war and most support a quick withdrawal of U.S. troops, according to a new USA TODAY/Gallup poll.

More than half of the respondents, or 55 percent, want most U.S. troops withdrawn within a year, but only 18 percent believe that will happen, USA Today reported on Tuesday.

The telephone poll of more than 1,000 adults was conducted after the bipartisan Iraq Study Group unveiled 79 recommendations for changing course in the unpopular war.

Bush is focusing on how to change strategy in Iraq after his Republican colleagues were swept from power in Congress last month largely because of anger about the war in Iraq. He could announce a shift in course next week.

His job approval rating hovered near a record low of 36 percent, according to a separate poll by ABC News and The Washington Post. His lowest point was 33 percent in May in the poll.

Seven in 10 disapproved of his handling of Iraq and 61 percent said the war was not worth fighting, it said.

In the USA Today/Gallup survey, three out of four of those polled said they supported the three major recommendations made by the Iraq Study Group: direct talks with Iran and Syria, withdrawing most U.S. combat troops by March 2008, and a new push aimed at resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Bush has rejected the troop withdrawal timetable and direct talks with Iran and Syria. He has not ruled out a regional conference involving Iran and Syria, but the White House indicated Iraq would have to set it up.

In a question asked of half the adults surveyed by USA Today/Gallup, a record high 62 percent said the war in Iraq wasn't "worth it," and a record low 16 percent said the United States was winning. That is less than half the 40 percent who held that view a year ago, the newspaper said.

The USA Today poll of 1,009 adults was taken December 8 and Sunday and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points for the full sample. The ABC News and Washington Post poll surveyed 1,005 adults between December 7 and Monday and has a 3-point margin of error.

(Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky)

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US interest rates on hold again

BBC NEWS
US interest rates on hold again
US interest rates have been kept on hold at 5.25% for the fourth time running amid widespread signs of a slowdown in the economy.

As expected, the Federal Reserve opted to take no action on monetary policy although it said it remained mindful of inflation concerns.

A sharp slowdown in manufacturing and the housing market has led some experts to forecast a rate cut next year.

Worries over economic prospects have hit the dollar in recent months.

'Mixed signals'

The currency fell to a 14-month low against sterling earlier this month amid mounting evidence that the US economy could slow significantly next year.

Manufacturing activity is weaker than it has been for more than three years, according to recent surveys, while the once-buoyant housing market has cooled markedly.

Rates have been frozen since August following 18 months of successive rises.

In a statement, the Fed's rate-setting committee said that while inflation risks remained it expected these to lessen next year.

"Economic growth has slowed over the course of the year, partly reflecting a substantial cooling of the housing market," it noted.

"Although recent indicators have been mixed, the economy seems likely to expand at a moderate pace on balance over coming quarters."

Watching retailers

The economy grew 2.2% in the past three months, a performance that was better than originally estimated.

This encouraged experts who have been looking to policymakers to ensure the slowdown in activity does not turn into a prolonged downturn.

Forecasts for retail spending in the run-up to Christmas, the most crucial time of the year for retailers, are mixed.

Consumer spending rose last month but Wal-Mart, the largest US store chain, suffered a fall in like-for-like sales.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/6174101.stm

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Welcome to the Web, Tom DeLay!

Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington
Welcome to the Web, Tom DeLay!

Dear Tom,

First let me say, welcome to the blogosphere -- always nice to have a new voice in the mix. So good to know you have access to a computer in jail (oh, sorry, you dodged that bullet). And thanks for the link.

But since you're a newbie blogger, I want to give you a hand by pointing out some rookie mistakes your site made in its diatribe about me and the Huffington Post today.

For starters, you seem to have missed the class on the difference between linking to a news story and offering an opinion on said news story. You claim that I was "in quite a tizzy" and that I'd "acquired sound intel" that there are Christians in the Defense Dept.

Acquired sound intel? That sounds so cloak and dagger, like a secret fact-finding golf mission to Scotland. You make it seem like I'm skulking around in a trench coat and fedora -- oh wait, that's your pal Jack Abramoff. Far from skulking or acquiring intel, what we actually did was "link" (a key term you should know as a blogger) to a story written by a reporter for "Reuters," which is a news wire service (a handy place to get "facts." Here's a link.)

As for my being in "a tizzy" over the story: trust me, linking, while fun, isn't that big a deal -- we do it at HuffPost dozens of times a day.

In this case, we linked to the story and headlined it "Senior Officers Accused of Coercing Soldiers to Adopt Evangelical Christianity." Which, if you read the story, is precisely what happened. You see, we don't make up the news. You're thinking of Fox.


One more thing: the Internet is a pretty fast moving place. So if you want to draw blood, you might want to try using a fresher zinger than saying I'm "the long lost 4th Gabor sister." No one LOLs at that one anymore. (I realize you may not understand what LOL means -- it's only 10 years out of date. Once you figure out the difference between a link and an opinion, let me know and I'll explain it. ; )

Welcome to the Internets!

Arianna

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Iranian President: Israel "Will Soon Be Wiped Out"

CNN.com
Iran's leader: 'Zionist regime will soon be wiped out'

TEHRAN, Iran (Reuters) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday told delegates at an international conference questioning the Holocaust that Israel's days were numbered.

Ahmadinejad, who has sparked international outcry by referring to the killing of 6 million Jews in World War II as a "myth" and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map," launched another verbal attack on the Jewish state.

"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards, and this is what God has promised and what all nations want," he said.

"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out," he added.

His words received warm applause from delegates at the Holocaust conference, who included ultra-Orthodox anti-Israel Jews and European and American writers who argue the Holocaust was either fabricated or exaggerated.

His remarks were condemned in Washington, where U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that the Iranian president's behavior was "despicable" and called his comment "absolutely outrageous."

The Vatican, Germany and the European Commission added their voices Tuesday to others -- such as the United States and Israel -- who have condemned the Tehran meeting.

Iran says it organized the conference to shed light on the reasons behind the formation of the state of Israel after World War II and to allow researchers from countries where it is a crime to question the Holocaust to speak freely.

"Iran is your home and is the home of all freedom seekers of the world," Ahmadinejad said. "Here you can express your views and exchange opinions in a friendly, brotherly and free atmosphere."

He urged countries where Holocaust denial is a crime to respect freedom of speech and not to take action against any of the conference participants on their return.

Human rights groups frequently number Iran as one of the world's worst violators of free speech, where scores of newspapers have been closed, journalists jailed, access to Web sites blocked and government critics hounded out of the country.

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Second Colorado evangelical resigns over gay sex

Reuters
Second Colorado evangelical resigns over gay sex

DENVER (Reuters) - A second Colorado evangelical leader in little over a month has resigned from the pulpit over a scandal involving gay sex, church officials said on Tuesday.

Paul Barnes has resigned from the 2,100-member Grace Chapel, a church he founded in suburban Denver, said church spokeswoman Michelle Ames.

Barnes' resignation follows last month's admission by high-profile preacher Ted Haggard that he was guilty of unspecified "sexual immorality" after a male prostitute went public with their liaisons.

Many evangelical Christians view homosexuality as a sin, though some are more strident on the issue than others.

Ames said Barnes told his congregation in a videotaped message on Sunday he had "struggled with homosexuality since he was five years old."

Barnes was confronted by an associate pastor of the church who received an anonymous phone call from a person who heard someone was threatening to go public with the names of Barnes and other evangelical leaders who engaged in homosexual behavior, Ames said.

Barnes, who is married with two grown daughters, then confessed to church elders.

Haggard had been a vocal opponent of gay marriage.

He stepped down as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and as pastor of the 14,000-member New Life "mega-church" in Colorado Springs.

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Court orders Skilling to jail

Reuters
Court orders Skilling to jail
By Eileen O'Grady

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ordered ex-Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling to begin serving immediately a 24-year prison sentence after a one-day reprieve, according to court documents.

Late on Tuesday, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Skilling's request to remain free on bail while he appeals fraud and conspiracy convictions.

"As a result of the Fifth Circuit's ruling, the government is pleased that the jury's verdict and the District Court's sentence will now be carried out for defendant Skilling," U.S. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said in a statement.

Skilling's attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, was not immediately available for comment.

Skilling had been scheduled to report to a Minnesota federal prison on Tuesday, but the Fifth Circuit Court said late on Monday that Skilling could stay out while a panel of the court's judges gave "careful consideration" to his bail request.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons said Skilling was not yet in their custody.

Veteran Houston appellate lawyer and TV legal commentator Brian Wice expressed amazement at the court's one-day reversal.

"I've never seen in 27 years of appellate practice the panel stay the decision to send someone to prison the day of and then reverse it the next day," Wice said. "How can you go from 'careful consideration' to 'don't let the cell door hit you in the behind'?"

Another appellate attorney, who declined to be identified, said the ruling does not mean the court has any opinion on Skilling's chance for a successful appeal and does not prevent Skilling from being granted bail at a later date.

Skilling, 53, was sentenced to 24 years in prison for his role in hiding Enron's financial condition from investors as the company's fortunes eroded prior to its 2001 collapse.

In May, a Houston jury convicted Skilling of defrauding investors. Skilling maintains he committed no crime and plans to appeal. His sentence is the longest handed out to a former Enron executive.

Energy giant Enron, once the seventh-largest U.S. company, spiraled into bankruptcy in a tangle of secret deals that hid billions of dollars in debt. Thousands of workers lost their jobs and pensions, and investors lost billions of dollars.

Skilling is to serve his sentence at the low-security prison in Waseca, Minnesota, which is about 75 miles south of Minneapolis.

Low-security prisons are designated for nonviolent offenders and often resemble school dormitories. The facilities typically do not have barbed wire or guard towers.

(Additional reporting by Bruce Nichols, Erwin Seba and Anna Driver)

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U.S. Moves to Restrain Prosecutors

The New York Times
U.S. Moves to Restrain Prosecutors
By LYNNLEY BROWNING

The Justice Department placed new restraints on federal prosecutors conducting corporate investigations yesterday, easing tactics adopted in the wake of the Enron collapse.

The changes were outlined in a memorandum written by Paul J. McNulty, the deputy attorney general. Under the revisions, federal prosecutors will no longer have blanket authority to ask routinely that a company under investigation waive the confidentiality of its legal communications or risk being indicted. Instead, they will need written approval for waivers from the deputy attorney general, and can make such requests only rarely.

The new guidelines will help companies defend themselves by “making it easier for corporations to say no, and not having to worry about that decision being held against them,” said Andrew Weissmann, who headed the Justice Department’s Enron task force and is now in private practice.

Another substantial change introduced yesterday prohibits prosecutors from considering, when weighing whether to seek the indictment of a company, whether it is paying the legal fees of an employee caught up in the inquiry.

The revised guidelines follow criticism from legal and business associations and from federal judges, senators and former top Justice Department officials that the tactics used in recent years against companies like the drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb and the accounting firm KPMG were coercive and unconstitutional.

“I don’t know if there are going to be more or less prosecutions,” said Stephen J. Bronis, executive director of the white-collar crime committee of the American Bar Association, “but there are hopefully going to be less abusive ones.”

Frederick P. Hafetz, a criminal defense lawyer, said yesterday that the courts were unlikely to view the new guidelines as a basis for appeal by individuals or companies convicted under the old ones.

Mr. McNulty, the deputy attorney general, said in a brief interview that the revisions “do not create any legal rights.”

Still, they are being made at a time when companies are seeking — and receiving — greater protection from criminal and regulatory scrutiny.

Last month, the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an independent group formed with the blessing of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., called for a sweeping overhaul of securities market rules, including greater protection of companies, their directors and employees, and their outside auditors from regulators, investigators and civil suits.

At the same time, there are growing calls to scale back the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the legislation aimed at increasing corporate accountability in the aftermath of the Enron collapse.

Mr. McNulty’s document substantially revises and places curbs on guidelines that were written in January 2003 amid a wave of corporate scandals at companies including WorldCom and Adelphia Communications. The Justice Department had argued that the guidelines adopted then, in a document known as the Thompson memorandum, were essential in helping it grapple with the surge in corporate wrongdoing.

In recent years, federal prosecutors have won more than 1,100 convictions in cases of corporate fraud.

The 2003 memorandum, written by Larry D. Thompson, then the deputy attorney general and now general counsel of PepsiCo, laid out nine guidelines that prosecutors must follow in considering whether to seek corporate indictments. The guidelines were intended to reward companies and employees that cooperated with investigators and penalize those that did not.

Those standards instructed federal prosecutors to reward companies or employees who turned over confidential legal communications, and to issue black marks against those who refused. The black mark could then be used as a basis to seek an indictment.

Critics of the Thompson memorandum complained that such waivers were uniformly being requested by prosecutors, with corporate officials deciding that even if their companies were not guilty, they had no choice to comply, given the possibility of indictment. An indictment can put a company out of business, as it did the accounting firm Arthur Andersen in 2002.

Calling legal confidentiality, or attorney-client privilege, “one of the oldest and most sacrosanct privileges under U.S. law,” the McNulty memorandum says that prosecutors may now request waivers only “when there is a legitimate need for the privileged information to fulfill their law enforcement obligations.”

The prosecutors should first try to obtain less sensitive factual information before requesting privileged material, the new memorandum says.

In a conference call yesterday, a senior Justice Department official said the original guidelines had been misunderstood by critics to mean that prosecutors could and should routinely ask for the disclosure of legal secrets. The official added later, though, that the guidelines had been revised because “perception is reality.”

Criminal defense lawyers and former attorneys general had argued that the Justice Department was out of touch with how frequently United States attorneys across 94 districts sought waivers. The official said the department undertook the changes because critics told it that companies were limiting their legal communications with lawyers out of fear that they might later be coerced by prosecutors.

Such limitations were inhibiting companies from rooting out wrongdoing, the official said.

But despite this tightening of the letter of the rules, companies under scrutiny may decide that the spirit of the new guidelines still tacitly encourages cooperation with prosecutors.

“The way the world really works is you have a prosecutor who says ‘I can’t ask you to waive privilege or not pay fees,’ ” said Robert S. Bennett, a prominent white-collar defense lawyer in New York who represented KPMG. “But the message to you, the company, might be ‘Well, if we do that, we might just score some brownie points.’ ”

It was the criminal investigation of former employees of KPMG over questionable tax shelters that focused attention on the Thompson memorandum, and, in particular, the guideline urging companies to cut off legal fees to employees caught up in investigations.

The judge overseeing that KPMG case, Lewis A. Kaplan, of Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled this summer that prosecutors violated the constitutional rights of the former employees when they pressed KPMG to cut off the fees as the firm itself faced potential indictment.

KPMG did cut off the fees, and later narrowly averted indictment by reaching a $456 million deferred-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department. The department, which is still appealing Judge Kaplan’s ruling, declined yesterday to talk about the KPMG case.

Among critics of the old prosecutorial guidelines, not all were excited about the new ones.

Stephanie Martz, director of the White Collar Crime Project at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said yesterday that her group would still seek the passage of legislation barring all disclosure of confidential communications and any prosecutorial credit to companies that did disclose. (Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the outgoing Judiciary Committee chairman, said last week that he would reintroduce legislation in January that prohibited prosecutors from seeking or requesting waivers or the cutting off of legal fees.)

Ms. Martz said: “You should get credit for fully disclosing whatever is fully relevant, but you shouldn’t get bonus points for disclosing privileged stuff. Now we’re at the point where waiver requests are routine, and the only way we can try to put that genie back in the bottle is by not allowing corporations to get credit for granting it.”

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House intelligence chair calls al Qaeda Shi'ite

Reuters
House intelligence chair calls al Qaeda Shi'ite

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Is al Qaeda a Sunni organization, or Shi'ite?

The question proved nettlesome for Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas, incoming Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

"Predominantly -- probably Shi'ite," he said in a recent interview with Congressional Quarterly, a periodical that covers political and legislative issues in Congress.

Unfortunately for Reyes, the al Qaeda network led by Osama bin Laden is comprehensively Sunni and subscribes to a form of Sunni Islam known for not tolerating theological deviation.

In fact, U.S. officials blame al Qaeda's former leader in Iraq, the late Abu Musab al Zarqawi, for the surge in sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

But Reyes' problems in the interview didn't end with al Qaeda.

Asked to describe the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Congressional Quarterly said Reyes responded: "Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah," and then said, "Why do you ask me these questions at five o'clock?"

Reyes' office issued a statement on Monday noting that the Congressional Quarterly interview covered a wide range of topics.

"As a member of the intelligence committee since before 9/11, I'm acutely aware of al Qaeda's desire to harm Americans. The intelligence committee will keep its eye on the ball and focus on the pressing security and intelligence issues facing us," Reyes said in the statement.

A former border patrol agent and a congressional opponent of the Iraq war, the Texas congressman was chosen for the chief intelligence job by House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi.

She rejected the panel's top-ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of California, who has had strained relations Pelosi. Next in line in terms of seniority was Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida, a former federal judge ousted from that post amid allegations of corruption.

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Democrats want timeout on special-interest money

Reuters
Democrats want timeout on special-interest money
By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats taking control of Congress next month say they will try to ban for the remainder of fiscal 2007 the special-interest "pork" projects that got Republicans in so much trouble with voters in the November elections.

"We will place a moratorium on all earmarks until a reformed process is put in place," the incoming Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House appropriations panels, Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, said late on Monday.

The recent proliferation of billions of dollars worth of special-interest projects being attached to annual spending bills likely contributed to Republicans losing majority control of Congress in November elections.

The projects have become the target of ridicule by those who say they represent wasteful spending. Alaska's "bridge to nowhere," an expensive 2005 project aimed at constructing a span to a small island that already had ferry service for the few residents, became one of the most glaring examples of Congress' addiction to "pork," critics said.

Members of Congress who seek out such projects argue they legitimately use taxpayer funds for local projects.

When the 110th Congress convenes on January 4, new Democratic leaders will be saddled with passing funding bills the Republican-controlled 109th Congress failed to do for the fiscal year that began on October 1.

As a result, most domestic programs are being run by a stopgap funding bill that expires on February 15.

Obey and Byrd said that when the new Congress convenes, they will push for passage of one gigantic bill to take care of this year's federal funding.

"FISCAL MAYHEM"

Only two of the 11 regular appropriations bills have been passed by Congress and signed into law. They cover around $500 billion in spending for the Defense Department and domestic security.

That leaves about $460 billion in funds, mostly for various domestic programs, that still need to be funded for the period of February 16-September 30.

"We are now responsible for finding a way out of this fiscal mayhem," said Byrd and Obey.

A spokesman for Byrd said the exact level of funding was still not determined for the large funding bill.

He noted that certain agencies, such as the Veterans Administration, will need additional funds to cover the growing costs of medical care for soldiers injured in Iraq.

A senior Bush administration official recently complained that the Republican-passed stopgap spending bill, which basically freezes most funding, hurts domestic law enforcement initiatives.

White House budget director Rob Portman said it was "disappointing" that Congress next year will not pass the nine remaining spending bills. He also warned Congress to "avoid gimmicks and unwarranted emergency spending."

Democrats have accused the White House of engaging in budget gimmicks over the past few years, especially because of its refusal to include realistic Iraq and Afghanistan war costs in budget plans and instead paying for the war through emergency spending requests.

Another such request, which could top $100 billion, is expected from Bush around early February, further complicating the work of the new Congress.

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U.S. to launch trials for nationwide e-health network

Computerworld
U.S. to launch trials for nationwide e-health network
Heather Havenstein

December 08, 2006 (Computerworld) The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said today that it will support trial projects that could be the first steps toward a nationwide health information network.

In several months, HHS will provide details of how the trials of a Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) will be implemented, according to an announcement on the HHS Web site. Proposals to create the trial projects and how to integrate them will be solicited in the spring, according to HHS.

"The trial implementations are a critical next step to move America closer to realizing an interoperable NHIN," said Robert Kolodner, interim national coordinator for health IT in a statement. "By bringing together the significant expertise and work achieved this year, by the current efforts with state and local health information exchanges, we can begin to construct the 'network of networks' that will form the basis of the NHIN."

Four consortiums under contract to develop prototype architectures for a nationwide network will unveil their prototypes in January.

These prototypes include developing functional requirements, security approaches and identifying standards for exchanging health information securely in different geographic locations, the HHS said.

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Maryland official reverses stance on e-voting bill

Computerworld
Maryland official reverses stance on e-voting bill
Todd Weiss

December 08, 2006 (Computerworld) Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said he plans to support a bill requiring that e-voting machines provide a paper trail, just months after opposing a similar measure.

Miller said he had opposed legislation filed earlier this year to require a paper trail of electronic votes because the bill was filed too close to last month's general election.

The senator said he had feared that local officials wouldn't have enough time to meet the requirements of the bill. With the next major election two years away, those officials should have plenty of time to ensure that e-voting machines provide a paper trail if such a law were enacted next year, he said.

"This is a concern about the future," Miller said. "We haven't had problems [with e-voting] in Maryland. Our optical machines have worked fine." He contended that problems in recent elections can be traced to human error.

For example, apparent human error was cited in September when some 12,000 Maryland voters were forced to use makeshift provisional ballots when they couldn't access e-voting machines during primary elections. At the time, officials said that cards required for access to the machines weren't shipped to 238 precincts in Montgomery County.

A law requiring a paper record of every vote cast would ensure the integrity of the election process, Miller said. "We want to make sure that every vote is counted and secure and that there is a paper trail," he added.

Rick Abbruzzese, a spokesman for Martin O'Malley, who will be sworn in as governor of Maryland on Jan. 17, said O'Malley has been reviewing e-voting issues with officials of the outgoing administration of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.

Abbruzzese said a workgroup has been charged with looking at election issues during the transition. "Their job is to come up with some recommendations for the governor-elect and the lieutenant governor-elect," Abbruzzese said.

Through a spokesman, Linda Lamone, administrator of the Maryland State Board of Elections, declined to comment on plans to revive the effort to require an e-voting paper trail.

Lillie Coney, coordinator for the National Committee for Voting Integrity, a project of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called voter-verifiable paper trails "the most secure way to audit an election and the most secure way to recover from [voting machine] failures."

"Maryland has been trying since 2002 to get it right with their voting systems," Coney said. "This is good news because that's where we are with the technology."

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Secrecy and Self-Governance

Huffington Post
Geoffrey R. Stone
Secrecy and Self-Governance

The next time our government insists it needs to keep things secret from us, we should remember where we are today. From the day it took office, the Bush administration has wrapped itself in unprecedented secrecy. It intentionally hid critical information about its deliberations and decisions from Congress, the courts, the press, and the American people.
Those who attempted to investigate or disclose what the administration kept secret were attacked and discredited.

For a time, this strategy worked. Protected by a shroud of secrecy, the administration appeared competent and all-knowing. Armed with a monopoly on information, it countered criticism as "ill-informed." And so, we went to war.

By almost all accounts, the war in Iraq has proved to be a disaster. The sad truth is that if the American people had known what the members of the administration knew when they knew it, many frightful errors might well have been avoided. That is why we have the First Amendment.

As we learn more each week about the wrong turns, mistakes, and misjudgments that led us to our current dilemma, we should reflect on the role of openness in a democratic society. We must learn the lessons of this experience.

As citizens of a self-governing nation, we are charged with the responsibility to understand, monitor, and evaluate the policy judgments of our elected representatives. We elect a president and members of Congress to make decisions on our behalf. But they are answerable to "We the People." This means not only that "We the People" get to vote every two, four, or six years, but also that we have a right to know what our representatives are up to. We delegate to them a certain degree of authority, but they are accountable to us.

It is understandable that those in power are reluctant to share information. Why would anyone in authority want to enable others to second-guess them? Why would they want their mistakes exposed? Those in power always believe they should have carte blanch to make the decisions they think best, without interference. "Trust us" is a perfectly logical demand from the perspective of those who hold the reins of power.

But in a self-governing society, when those in authority say "trust us," we are in peril. The American constitutional system is premised on distrust of those to whom we delegate authority. Separation of powers, checks and balances, staggered terms of office, a bicameral legislature, judges with life tenure, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are all premised on distrust of those in authority who say "trust us."

Excessive government secrecy is the enemy of democracy. Secrecy cripples public debate. Citizens cannot understand, monitor, and evaluate public policies if they are kept in the dark about the actions of their elected representatives. Secrecy is the ultimate form of censorship because the People do not even know they are being censored.

Excessive secrecy is also the enemy of competence. We make better decisions when we consider more rather than fewer perspectives. We make better decisions when we openly debate the alternatives. We make better decisions when we know we have to justify our judgments and know we will be held accountable for our mistakes. Secrecy undermines all these values.

Excessive secrecy has been a consistent theme of the Bush administration. It refused to disclose the names of those it detained after September 11. It has adopted a crabbed interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act, rendering millions of pages of government documents unavailable to the American people. It closed deportation proceedings from public scrutiny. It has redacted vast quantities of "sensitive" information from thousands of government websites. It secretly authorized the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance of American citizens. It secretly established prisons in Eastern Europe and secretly authorized rendition and torture. It secretly authorized the indefinite detention of American citizens. It has concealed the cost of its policies in "special appropriations" bills, threatened public employees and newspapers with criminal prosecution for revealing its secrets, and deliberately masked its motives, its policies, and its failures from We the People.

Some measure of secrecy is, of course, essential to the effective functioning of government, especially in wartime. But the Bush administration's obsessive secrecy has constrained meaningful oversight by Congress, the press, and the public. It has directly and arrogantly undermined the vitality of democratic governance and it has predictably led to incompetent decisionmaking. One cannot escape the inference that the cloak of secrecy imposed by the Bush administration has less to do with the necessities of the "war on terrorism" than with its desire to insulate executive action from public scrutiny. Such an approach to governance weakens our democratic institutions and renders our nation less secure.

The responsibility for all this rests first and foremost with the president, but it rests also with Congress, the press, and the American people, who failed to meet their responsibility not to fall victim to the plea of "Trust Us."

If history is a guide to the future, this will not be the last time a president attempts to hide critical information from the American people. We will best serve our government and our nation if we remember our mistakes of the present.

This post was written jointly by Geoffrey R. Stone and William P. Marshall

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Hannity's Boswell to Rummy's Johnson

Huffington Post
Marty Kaplan
Hannity's Boswell to Rummy's Johnson

The news that SecDef Rumsfeld's double super secret surprise farewell tour of Iraq was being taken without any press accompanying him was not contradicted by the news that Sean Hannity was on the plane with him.

As Rummy hopped from base to beleaguered base, still promoting the Iraq war as the one true way to stop Al Qaeda from making more 9/11s, who better than Hannity to have along as a fluffer?

Prepare for a week of EXCLUSIVE!s reassuring Fox viewers that we are, indeed, going to stay the course, and that Bush's bipartisan blather about A New Way Forward is just mush for the wimps. Who cares what 41's girly-men think? No one comes home from Viet - I mean, Iraq, until Kissinger says so.

Not only can Hannity be counted on to deliver the "Rummy is no surrender monkey" eulogy for the departing Secretary. Giving the Fox bullyboy the only media seat on the plane provided Rumsfeld with the pleasure of saying f-you to the New York Times and the Washington Post, to the networks and the wires, to the com-symps and America-haters who bedeviled his press conferences and sorely tried his royal patience. I wonder why Armstrong Williams and Bob Novak didn't get asked along.

The images of Rumsfeld saying goodbye to the troops on this trip are no doubt the ones he wants us to remember him by. Too bad for him that the pyramids of naked Iraqis don't wash easily from the mind. Tough luck that the flag-draped American coffins, no matter how hard he tried to prevent them from being photographed, are more enduring than the footage Fox will be flogging this week when it's not too busy defending Christmas from the Hassids.

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A Known-Known: Donald Rumsfeld's Farewell Ego-Trip to Iraq

Huffington Post
Arianna Huffington
A Known-Known: Donald Rumsfeld's Farewell Ego-Trip to Iraq

One thing you can say about Donald Rumsfeld, he's consistent. Contemptuous and arrogant right up until the very end of his disastrous tenure. Or, to put it in Rumsfeldese: Am I Don Rumsfeld? Sure. Am I going to continue to put the needs of my own preening ego above the interests of the United States?
You bet!

I'm talking about Rumsfeld's "surprise" farewell visit to the troops in Iraq this past weekend. With Rumsfeld ready to clean out his office, what, specifically, was the purpose of this trip? Do our soldiers really need more empty jingoism right now? Had Rumsfeld put the same amount of energy and thought into providing sufficient resources for them as he did into his pathetic, clowning, showboating rhetorical gymnastics, a lot more of them would have been around for his last cynical photo-op.

And though it pales in comparison to the over $350 billion we've already spent in Iraq, what was the cost of this little jaunt? Getting Rumsfeld over there, providing security for him, and stage managing this ego band-aid didn't come cheap.

And all for what, exactly?

Apparently, so the Pentagon can post a "news article" with the headline:
"Troops Haven't Lost Faith in Rumsfeld"

And so Rumsfeld could tell the troops:
"For the past six years, I have had the opportunity and, I would say the privilege, to serve with the greatest military on the face of the Earth."

Yes, I'm sure that's true, but why do more lives have to be endangered and more money spent so that a lame lame-duck Defense Secretary can go over and repeat what we all already know?

Or so, as the Pentagon article puts it, the troops can be reminded that:
"The enemy threatens all Americans hold dear and does not want people to have freedom to worship, speak, read or even think, Rumsfeld said. 'The enemy must be defeated.'"

Thanks, Donald. Without that kind of nuanced thinking, there would be no American troops in Iraq for you to address.

Truth be told, this trip wasn't for the troops -- it was, like so much of what Donald Rumsfeld did during his tenure, for Donald Rumsfeld.

Rah-rah photo-ops are not what the troops need right now. I have no doubt their fighting spirit and dedication are every bit as high as Rumsfeld says they are. But why did the Secretary feel it was in the best interests of the country for him to go say "farewell" in person? How about a mass email instead? A farewell video on YouTube, perhaps?

But, no, those wouldn't have bucked up Rumsfeld's spirit quite as much. And, really, isn't that what it's all about? Our whole tragic foray into Iraq has been about the needs of a few select egos from the start, so why should anything change now, just because we're over three years and almost 3,000 dead American soldiers into it?

This trip was about Donald Rumsfeld showing the country that while he may have been fired he was going out the same way he came in -- strutting, pompous, and self-serving. The horrors caused by his failures haven't dimmed his arrogance one iota. And that, in Rumsfeld-speak, is a "known-known."

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Iraq’s President Harshly Criticizes U.S. Strategy: Says US Has Moved "From Failure To Failure"

The New York Times
Iraq’s President Harshly Criticizes U.S. Strategy
By KIRK SEMPLE

BAGHDAD, Dec. 10 — President Jalal Talabani said Sunday that the American program to train Iraq’s security forces had been a repeated failure and he denounced a plan to increase the number of American advisers working with the Iraqi Army, saying it would subvert the country’s sovereignty.

Mr. Talabani’s remarks, in an interview with Western news service reporters that was later summarized and distributed by his office, amounted to an extraordinarily harsh denunciation of a central American strategy in Iraq as well as a major recommendation of the report issued last week by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group in Washington. He is the highest ranking Iraqi official to criticize the report, adding to anger among Iraqi leaders who have disagreed with some of its recommendations.

American commanders have poured more than $12 billion into training and equipping Iraq’s security forces and have tied a withdrawal of American troops to success in these efforts. But Mr. Talabani ridiculed them. “What have they done so far in training the army and the police?” he said. “What they have done is move from failure to failure.”

Mr. Talabani, who is Kurdish, said the Iraq Study Group report offered some “dangerous” recommendations that he said were “an insult to the Iraqi people” in that they undermined the country’s ability to control its own army and police.

He did not offer specific criticisms of the American training program, except to blame the Americans for inadequately screening recruits to the Shiite-dominated police to ensure their loyalties to the state rather than to a sect.

American and some Iraqi officials say some Iraqi police and army units are more beholden to Shiite militias than to the government and have helped to drive the cycles of retributive violence by attacking Sunni Arabs. Some Iraqi officials have also said that Sunni Arab officers have abetted the Sunni-led insurgency.

The Americans, Mr. Talabani said, “gathered them from the street regardless of their loyalty to the new Iraq, their capacity, their ability. These mistakes would be repeated if the Iraqi Army would be under the control of foreign officers, and we would never accept it.”

The Iraq Study Group called for increasing the number of American trainers to as many as 20,000 from the current level of more than 4,000, in the hope that it would help Iraqi units move more quickly to assume full control of the nation’s security.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, told Congress last month that he envisioned doubling the number of American trainers, but senior military officers now say they are planning to at least triple the number of trainers.

The shift has been endorsed in general terms by President Bush, and in recent weeks, commanders in Iraq have started moving hundreds of troops from their combat ranks to training teams.

American commanders have argued that expanding the training teams would allow trainers to work more closely with Iraqi soldiers and police. In addition, trainers would be able to watch more closely for sectarian biases and abuses.

But Mr. Talabani said the proliferation of American advisers threatened Iraqi control of the security forces.

“Assigning foreign officers in every unit of the Iraqi Army is a breach of Iraqi sovereignty,” he said, according to the translation issued by his office. “What will be left of this sovereignty if the Iraqi Army becomes a tool in the hands of foreign officers coming from outside?”

He added, “We want our hand to be free, not paralyzed, in fighting terror.”

Mr. Talabani’s remarks may be dismaying to the American leadership, which has regarded him as one of its more reliable and like-minded partners here.

Mr. Talabani’s attack on the Iraq Study Group report was wide-ranging and vociferous.

He criticized a recommendation for a law that would allow some former members of the outlawed Baath Party to return to government. The measure would reverse a “de-Baathification” process that has marginalized thousands of Sunni Arabs who worked in the Baathist government of Saddam Hussein.

He also said he supported a statement issued Thursday by Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan region, who objected to several elements of the report that could weaken Kurdish autonomy by delaying an opportunity for the Kurds to govern the contested oil city of Kirkuk, and by giving the central government control over all oil revenue.

Mr. Talabani bristled at the report’s recommendation that a continuation of American military and financial assistance to Iraq be contingent on Iraqi performance. Setting conditions, he said, “was an insult to the Iraqi people.”

The leaders of the Iraq Study Group, James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, defended their report on Sunday against Mr. Talabani’s attack. “Up until this point, we’ve given a blank check to the Iraqis,” Mr. Hamilton said on CNN. “And I’m not surprised that the president would like that sort of a deal. But we believe that the American people want our aid to be conditional. We want that aid to be given only if there is a response from the Iraqi government that shows performance.”

Mr. Baker called Mr. Talabani’s comments “disappointing” but said that unless Iraq’s leaders were able to unite under a national reconciliation plan, the world could expect “not just a broad-based civil war but a wider regional war.”

Sectarian violence continued to torment Iraq’s civilian population on Sunday. Gun battles broke out between Sunni and Shiite militias in a predominantly Shiite enclave of Al Amil, a neighborhood in southwestern Baghdad. The police said at least five people were killed.

Gunmen stormed a home in Jihad, a mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood in southwestern Baghdad, killing nine people, an Interior Ministry official said.

The attacks came a day after gangs of armed Shiite militiamen rampaged through Hurriya, a mixed neighborhood in north-central Baghdad, driving scores of Sunni Arabs from their homes in what a Sunni colonel in the Iraqi Army described as one of the most flagrant episodes of sectarian warfare in the capital.

The police reported Sunday that they had found five bodies near a mosque in the neighborhood, all presumably victims of the Shiite attack on Saturday. At least 46 other corpses were found by the authorities elsewhere in the capital.

Baghdad has been consumed by a cycle of bloody sectarian violence that has sent thousands of families from mixed Sunni-Shiite areas fleeing for the safety of neighborhoods in which their own sect dominates.

Agence France-Presse reported that Iraqi authorities had detained the chief of the prison in Badush, near Tikrit, in connection with the escape of Ayman Sabawi, Saddam Hussein’s nephew, on Saturday.

The American military command said Sunday that an American soldier was killed, and another wounded, when a bomb exploded next to their patrol west of the capital.

The outgoing defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, said during a two-day visit to Iraq that American troops should remain there until the insurgency was defeated.

“We feel great urgency to protect the American people from another 9/11 or a 9/11 times two or three,” Mr. Rumsfeld said on Saturday, in remarks that were posted Sunday on the Defense Department’s Web site.

“At the same time, we need to have the patience to see this task through to success,” he said during the stop, which American military officials called Mr. Rumsfeld’s farewell visit to the troops.

Christine Hauser in New York contributed reporting.

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Exit Strategy

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Just A Little Headstrong

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What Bush Wants For Christmas

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Bush Finds Some Useful Things in Baker Report

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Old Job

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Tastes Like Humble

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Bush Aides Seek Alternatives to Iraq Study Group’s Proposals, Calling Them Impractical

The New York Times
Bush Aides Seek Alternatives to Iraq Study Group’s Proposals, Calling Them Impractical
By JIM RUTENBERG and DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 9 — Administration officials say their preliminary review of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s recommendations has concluded that many of its key proposals are impractical or unrealistic, and a small group inside the National Security Council is now racing to come up with alternatives to the panel’s ideas.

In interviews over the last two days with officials from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and foreign diplomats, President Bush and his top aides were described as deeply reluctant to follow the core strategy advocated by the study group: to pressure Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to rein in sectarian violence faced with reduced United States military and economic support.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has cautiously embraced that approach, several officials said, but others — including people in the National Security Council and the vice president’s office — argue that the risks are too high. “The worry is that the more Maliki is seen as our puppet, because he is abiding by our timelines and deadlines, the internal political dynamics will become so fragile that the whole government would collapse,” said one senior official participating in the internal review. “That would set us back a year.” A senior official said the administration was not near a “decision point” on how to go about influencing Mr. Maliki to move faster, and he said it was taking seriously some of the report’s suggestions.

But in interviews, senior administration officials, who would not be quoted by name because Mr. Bush has made no final decisions about how to deal with the Iraq panel’s recommendations, questioned the study group’s assertions that Iran had an interest in helping to stabilize the situation in Iraq, or that it made sense to start negotiations with Iran without conditions. And they took issue with the decision by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and the nine other members of the commission to make no mention of promoting democracy as an American goal in the Middle East, and to drop any suggestion that “victory” was still possible in Iraq when they presented their findings to Mr. Bush and to the public on Wednesday.

“You saw that the president used the word ‘victory’ again the next day,” said one of Mr. Bush’s aides. “Believe me, that was no accident.”

The administration’s inclination to dismiss so many of the major findings of the bipartisan group sets the stage for what could become a titanic struggle over Iraq policy. Just two months ago, administration officials were saying that they believed the findings by the panel headed by Mr. Baker and Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman, would be all but written in stone — and that Mr. Bush would have little choice but to carry out most of them. But in recent weeks, the White House sought to describe the panel’s role as that of one advisory group among many.

Andrew H. Card Jr., the president’s chief of staff until last spring, said that whatever Mr. Bush did in Iraq would probably fall short of many of the commission’s recommendations, and that he was likely to continue making decisions that he believed were right even if unpopular. Referring to Mr. Bush’s secret intelligence briefings, Mr. Card said, “The president by definition knows more than any of those people who are serving on these panels.”

“The president’s obligations sometimes require him to be very lonely,” he said.

Mr. Bush has empowered the “Crouch Group,” a small group of advisers being coordinated by Jack D. Crouch II, the deputy national security adviser, to assemble alternative proposals from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State Department, the Treasury Department and staff of the National Security Council.

The administration’s strategy appears to be: Adopt parts of the recommendations that are under way already, or that are considered minor modifications of those efforts, and pick away at those that the administration believes imply retreat or folly. For example, the administration is embracing a recommendation that it put energy into reviving Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Ms. Rice is planning a trip to the region early next year, and the administration says it plans to build on a new initiative by Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Similarly, officials have described the report’s call for the creation of an “Iraq International Support Group” as a natural expansion of two regional forums that Ms. Rice has already met with several times, an economic cooperation group called the “Compact for Iraq” and the “Gulf Plus Two” group, which includes the Gulf Cooperation Council, plus Egypt and Jordan.

But other recommendations are being cast as overly optimistic. For example, while White House and Pentagon officials note that they are already embedding additional trainers and advisers in Iraqi units, they expressed deep skepticism that the force of 4,000 advisers could be rapidly increased to the 10,000 to 20,000 envisioned in the report. As a result, they said, they doubted it would be possible to pull back all 15 American combat brigades from Iraq’s streets and towns by the first quarter of 2008, the goal in the panel’s report.

The primary author of the military section of the report, William J. Perry, who was defense secretary under President Clinton, said in an interview on Friday that the administration’s resistance was baffling to him. “There are many ways in which the training goals can be achieved in a timely way,” he said. “If there is a will to carry out the proposed embedding program, it can be done.”

That argument appears to foreshadow the debate that will develop as Mr. Bush seeks advice at the State Department, the Pentagon and elsewhere next week. Members of the study group say they expect to be defending both their individual proposals and the need for an integrated diplomatic and military package. “Given the track record these guys in the White House have, you would think they would show a little humility about taking aboard some outside ideas,” said one Republican member of the commission who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Dan Senor, a former administration spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, said that in conversations with administration officials, they had dismissed many of the report’s recommendations as “not terribly realistic from an operational standpoint.”

He said former colleagues had told him they felt comforted by the recognition that there were no good options, because despite all of the intellect brought to the endeavor, the members of the panel had failed to make the leap from strategy to implementation. “It’s easy to suggest these steps in theory, but we haven’t been able to figure out the how,” Mr. Senor said. “Now, neither have these 10 wise men and woman.”

One of the continuing debates within the White House and the Pentagon is whether to temporarily “surge” the number of American forces in Baghdad, in an effort to regain control over Baghdad. But the Pentagon has said that most of the additional 30,000 forces should be Iraqis.

One foreign diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was discussing American deliberations, said one strategy being considered would include dividing the labor between American and Iraqi forces — with Americans focusing on hunting down elements of Al Qaeda, and the Iraqi forces focusing more on sectarian clashes. The Iraq Study Group report leaves open the possibility of a temporary increase in forces, and envisions a similar role for the United States in seeking out Al Qaeda.

An administration official said that such a division of labor could not be so black and white. And Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be urging caution in dealing with the Shiite and Sunni factions, concerned that the administration avoid signaling that the Shiites would be abandoned as they were at the end of the Persian Gulf war.

The report’s authors say their strategy will work only if taken largely as a whole; Mr. Baker warned against treating it like a “fruit salad,” picking the juiciest pieces. The White House, however, appears to be groping for the right fork to do exactly that.

Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said that in spite of Mr. Baker’s public suggestion that the administration should follow its recommendations fully, “Members of the Baker-Hamilton commission made it clear that they don’t expect everybody to agree with each and every jot and tittle.”

“And the president as commander in chief,” Mr. Snow said, “still has the obligation to take seriously every bit of analysis and advice he gets, and to make his own decisions.”

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Congress approves offshore drilling bill

Reuters
Congress approves offshore drilling bill
By Chris Baltimore

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hours before adjourning for the year, the U.S. Congress on Saturday sent President George W. Bush legislation that would open 8.3 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and natural gas drilling and redistribute billions of dollars in royalties to four Gulf states.

The drilling measure was wrapped into a broad tax and trade package that the U.S. Senate approved by a 79-9 vote, hours after the House of Representatives approved it.

Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Louisiana Republican and one of the drilling measure's main supporters, said Bush will sign the bill into law.

The offshore legislation ends a 25-year ban on drilling in deep waters about 125 miles south of Florida's Panhandle, but extends a moratorium on drilling in other Florida waters until 2022.

The area known as "Lease Sale 181" holds an estimated 1.26 billion barrels of crude oil and 5.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In a statement, the White House said the bill "will help to reduce our dependence on imported sources of energy by increasing access to domestic sources of oil and gas."

But it will be years before the tracts are leased to energy companies and the new supplies actually hit the market.

More offshore areas would have been opened if Republican House leaders had won Senate support for a bill passed by the House earlier this year that sought to open nearly all U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coastal waters more than 100 miles offshore.

But with time dwindling before the 109th Congress adjourned, key House Republicans agreed this week to use the more limited Senate bill.

Key to winning support in the Senate was a provision that gives four Gulf Coast states -- Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama -- 37.5 percent of the royalties collected from oil and gas production on federal leases off their shores.

Gulf Coast lawmakers had sought the money for coastal restoration projects to repair damage from storms like Hurricane Katrina.

According to congressional estimates, that provision could redistribute about $60 billion in federal leasing fees to states over the next 25 years. After taxes, drilling royalties are the government's second-biggest revenue source.

Natural gas users, from farmers to manufacturers, have backed the drilling bill because they hope the extra supplies will mean lower energy bills.

Environmental groups said U.S. consumers would be better served if Congress pursued measures to cut U.S. crude oil consumption, which is about 20 million barrels per day.

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Congress ends with a flurry of legislation

Reuters
Congress ends with a flurry of legislation
By Richard Cowan and Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Republican-led 109th Congress ended on Saturday, sending President Bush legislation to normalize trade with former enemy Vietnam, renew popular tax cuts, open the Gulf of Mexico to new oil and gas drilling and keep the government running.

The package was among a stack of bills the Senate and House of Representatives passed as Democrats, victorious in last month's elections, prepared to take control of the new 110th Congress set to convene on January 4.

Democrats vow a quick start by voting next month for the first federal minimum wage increase in a decade. They also are looking to cut costs for health care and education and step up calls for a new strategy in the Iraq war.

"We must end the policies that have divided this nation and come together on a new way forward," Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas said in his party's weekly Saturday radio address.

In his weekly radio address on Saturday, Bush also called for an end to partisan bickering over Iraq.

"Now it is the responsibility of all of us in Washington -- Republicans and Democrats alike -- to come together and find greater consensus on the best way forward," Bush said.

BEATING DEADLINES, PASSING BUCK

Among the bills passed in a marathon session that stretched from early Friday to around 4:40 a.m. (0940 GMT) on Saturday was a bill to help clear the way for nuclear-armed India to buy U.S. nuclear reactors and fuel for the first time in 30 years.

Just beating a Friday midnight deadline, Congress also approved a stop-gap funding bill to keep the government running into next year.

The bill was needed because Republicans left behind nine of 11 spending bills that finance various government programs for the new Democratic-led Congress to finish.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who is retiring from Congress, hailed his fellow Republicans for their work in the final hours of their control.

"Just when everyone bet against us, Republicans put together a broad package of energy, tax, trade and health care measures," Frist said.

The bill would set aside Cold War restrictions on trade with Vietnam and clear the way for U.S. farmers, bankers and other businesses to share in the market-opening benefits of Hanoi's entry into the World Trade Organization next month.

Retiring House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, a California Republican, called the bill "a significant milestone in our efforts to mend the wounds of one of the most divisive conflicts in our nation's history."

The package also gave new life to some expired tax breaks for research and development, education, state and local sales taxes and other popular causes and canceled a pay cut next year for doctors who treat the elderly under Medicare.

The 109th Congress had been criticized for its short work weeks as well as failing to approve a number of major legislative efforts, such as a revamp of immigration laws and the Social Security retirement program. Democrats decried a "culture of corruption" during the election campaign.

On the final full day, a House ethics panel issued a report concluding top Republicans were negligent in failing to protect young interns from unwanted advances by former Rep. Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned in an Internet sex scandal shortly before the November 7 elections.

But the bipartisan panel said it found no violation of House ethics rules and meted out no punishment other than admonishing those it said should have done more.

(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan, Donna Smith)

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Congress approves bioterrorism preparedness bill

Reuters
Congress approves bioterrorism preparedness bill
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress on Saturday passed a bill to improve U.S. preparedness for bioterrorism or other health crises, in part by accelerating development of new vaccines and drugs.

The bill, sponsored by Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Edward Kennedy and North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr, was one of a number of bills passed by Congress before adjourning Saturday morning and sent to President George W. Bush.

"With this bill, we take many important steps to increase our preparedness and response capabilities for public health emergencies by increasing our medical surge capacity, strengthening our public health infrastructure, and clarifying the responsibilities of federal officials," Kennedy said.

Many experts have warned that the United States is poorly prepared to respond to a terrorism attack involving germ warfare agents, like anthrax or small pox, or to potential pandemics like bird flu. The measure would provide $1 billion over three years to develop vaccines and drugs to counter such threats.

It also would build on Project BioShield, a $5.6 billion program created in 2004 that was spurred by the September 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent anthrax scares, and would aim to develop more and better drugs and vaccines in a national stockpile.

The Department of Health and Human Services would be designated as the lead federal agency to respond to public health emergencies under the legislation, which also would create a central authority within the department to handle the mission.

One intent of the measure is to unify the command and control for all of the public health and medical preparedness and response programs under an assistant HHS secretary, in an effort to avoid the chaotic response federal officials gave to Hurricane Katrina last year after it battered New Orleans.

The measure also would reauthorize a law that established grants to state and local public health authorities to improve their readiness.

The bill would establish within the Health and Human Services Department the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to oversee the initiative and establish a National Biodefense Science Board to advise the government on emerging threats as well as promising breakthroughs in life sciences.

Industry was disappointed with Project BioShield in part because because it did not help pay the cost of research and development of drugs and vaccines that have little commercial appeal.

With that in mind, this legislation would permit companies to get up to half the amount of their procurement contract in increments of 5 percent through the drug development process if they meet certain goals.

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