Prometheus 6   

2004

• MTClient ver 1.0, RC1
• Relocate P6 to a new web host
• Write up my impressions from "Economics Explained," including why most folks reason wrongly about it (in brief, ignorance of the meaning of terms as used in the discipline)
• Figure out how to inspire more Black folks to blog (irrespective of their political orientation)
• Do my laundry
• Do some more writing for OSP

Just let me win Lotto this weekend and I'll snap it up

Town 'sold' on EBay up for sale in usual way
Online buyers backed out after seeing Bridgeville
Pamela J. Podger, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, December 27, 2003

It was a year ago this weekend that a tiny spot on the map in Humboldt County became, for a brief moment, the brightest star in the firmament of cyberspace.

Days of bidding on the online auction site EBay for ownership of the entire town of Bridgeville -- what there is of it -- ended when someone pledged $1.77 million. In the end, however, the high-tech hoopla amounted to zilch, and the town is still looking for a buyer. A solid one.

This time, Bridgeville's current owner, Elizabeth Lapple, has chosen the conventional multiple-listing service for local real estate sales.

Agent Denise Stuart said the $850,000 price tag will tantalize a buyer -- and leave ample spare change for improvements at a place that has more twinkle than townsfolk.

"I've been very up-front with people that it will take a healthy chunk of money," to restore the hamlet's luster, Stuart said. "They aren't making any more land in Humboldt County."

The EBay auction for Bridgeville, touted as a place ripe for a private retreat or family compound "basking in the glory of the redwoods," transfixed holiday shoppers in December 2002. There were more than the 136,000 hits for the faded little town, on Highway 36 about 260 miles north of San Francisco.

In all, there were 249 bids for the town's 82 acres, 10 houses, four cabins, a tractor, a cemetery, one mile or so of river frontage, some Quonset huts and a building leased to the U.S. Postal Service.

Not included in the sale were two bridges, an elementary school, a Pacific Bell office and the county road department's yard.

Several of the 20 or so townsfolk say the diamond in the rough that is Bridgeville was overblown in the EBay description. No wonder the bidders got cold feet, they said.

"I wasn't a bit surprised because the town was grossly misrepresented," Jessie Wheeler said. "The houses are barely habitable, it is overgrown everywhere, and the cafe and store were both shut down years ago.''

Not really a new problem

Allegations of cheating hint at stress teachers feel

By Megan Tench, Globe Staff, 12/27/2003

Since the advent of MCAS exams, educators have worried that the tests put too much pressure on students, but now allegations of cheating in a Worcester elementary school are fueling criticism that the tests unduly strain teachers and administrators, as well.

The allegations of cheating, which triggered the state's first investigation into schoolwide cheating by teachers, may suggest that accountability requirements under the federal No Child Left Behind Act are raising the stress level of those in the front of the classroom.

While some educators say that cheating is an extreme and isolated response, everyone is feeling the heat of increased government scrutiny.

"There are 16 different ways to become a low-performing school under federal law," said Joseph O'Sullivan, a 19-year teaching veteran and president of the Brockton Education Association, a teachers' union group. "Nobody should have their whole career measured by a paper and pencil test. It hurts students, and it hurts teachers."

Since the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System tests were introduced five years ago, there have been fiery debates over whether MCAS inspires teachers and students to perform or pushes them to act irresponsibly, out of fear of being labeled failing. Federal performance standards under the No Child Left Behind Act increased pressure.

Some education observers, however, doubt that holding schools accountable for test scores forces teachers to act unethically.

"We often hear people saying accountability will incite some educators to do things that are bad for students, but that is simply not true," said Craig Jerald, policy analyst for the Education Trust, a nonprofit group that monitors the No Child Left Behind Act.

When it comes to the pressure of statewide exams, "the vast majority of teachers respond in ways that are ethical and responsible," he said. "There are always isolated examples of teachers and administrators who make bad choices, but there is no evidence that accountability forces adults to make bad choices."

In Worcester, a principal and teacher at Chandler Elementary Community School were placed on paid administrative leave this week after school officials questioned the school's latest test scores, which skyrocketed after years of mediocrity.

School sources say that the principal, Irene C. Adamaitis, violated state policy by distributing state MCAS exams to teachers days before spring testing began and that special education teacher Gail G. Dufour later helped her students choose correct answers.

State and district officials say more teachers could be implicated. Officials suspect that some teachers coached students by going over subjects covered in the test days before administering it.

State rules, outlined in a 200-page manual, prohibit opening packages containing test materials or discussing the exam before it's given.

A prefect time for a preemptive strike

Massive Earthquake Kills At Least 20,000 in Iran

By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003; 3:42 AM

TEHRAN, Dec. 27--A strong earthquake in southeastern Iran killed at least 20,000 people in and around the historic city of Bam early Friday, according to Iranian officials who appealed for international assistance in searching for survivors and recovering the dead.

On transparent government

U.S. Decisions On Iraq Spending Made in Private

By Jackie Spinner and Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 27, 2003; Page A01

Iraqis spooked by rumors of a fuel shortage were hoarding the precious commodity, inadvertently causing exactly what they feared. Officials in charge of oil for the U.S.-led occupation government in Baghdad were worried that there would be riots if they didn't do something to improve the situation fast. And so on Nov. 29, they went to Saddam Hussein's former presidential palace and sought help.

By nightfall, they had received an emergency allotment of $425 million to import fuel from neighboring countries. Although it didn't solve what appears to be a chronic fuel shortage, it did help avert a crisis.

The spending was approved by the 11-member Program Review Board, a mini-Congress of sorts for the occupation government in its power to allocate money. The board -- comprising mostly Americans, Britons and Australians -- was appointed by L. Paul Bremer, the top administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. It uses Iraqi money that includes oil revenue and seized assets from the Hussein era to pay for projects not anticipated by the country's budget. So far the board has approved more than $4 billion in such spending.

During its twice-weekly afternoon meetings, the board has approved more than 500 projects, including $120 million for printing and distributing currency, $36 million for renovating police stations, $15 million for a national microcredit program and $4 million for creating a radio system for the railroad network. It also has signed off on scores of smaller projects, including $3,500 to start a Baghdad theater festival, $50,000 to pay two zookeepers and $79,245 to reestablish the Baghdad stock exchange.

As the skeleton of an Iraqi government has been formed, the board has begun to hand off more of the responsibility for handling specific projects to the ministries. But the board still handles the overall allocations.

Of the billions of dollars appropriated or promised for the largest nation-building project since World War II, the Iraqi money doled out by Bremer and the Program Review Board is the least visible. Spending of the $18.6 billion the U.S. Congress approved this fall for Iraqi reconstruction will be overseen by an office run by a retired U.S. admiral. The $13 billion pledged from other countries will be monitored by an Iraqi-run oversight board.

Despite detailed regulations and pronouncements about "transparency," the Coalition Provisional Authority's process for spending Iraq's money has little of the openness, debate and paper trails that define such groups in democratic nations. Though the interim government has extensive information on its Web site, it doesn't include, for example, when contracts have been awarded. Citing security concerns, it also doesn't say what companies won them.

Like I don't have enough books to read already

AMERICAN JESUS
How the Son of God Became a National Icon.
By Stephen Prothero.

On Jan. 20, 1804, Thomas Jefferson ordered from a Philadelphia bookseller two copies of the King James Version of the New Testament. An unflinching rationalist, Jefferson deeply admired Jesus the man but disdained the cloak of doctrine and mysticism in which he'd been draped. And so, despite all his duties as president, Jefferson found the time to sit down in the White House with his Bibles and, over several evenings, excise with a razor all those passages that related to the virgin birth, the resurrection, the incarnation and anything else that smacked of the supernatural. Only about 1 in 10 verses survived. Jefferson cut them out and pasted them into two columns of 46 octavo sheets, the size ministers then favored. Published as ''The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,'' this truncated Gospel portrayed Jesus as a wise man who spent his time wandering around Galilee, delivering parables and aphorisms.

By this act, Stephen Prothero writes, Jefferson became America's first real Bible scholar, and his cut-and-paste Gospel marked the birth of an ''American Jesus,'' a ''malleable and multiform'' figure whose story over the next two centuries would be constantly remolded and reimagined to fit the needs of succeeding generations. In ''American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon,'' Prothero,+a professor of religion at Boston University, mines not only sermons and theological tracts but also novels, biographies, songs, films, the press and the visual arts to ''see how Americans of all stripes have cast the man from Nazareth in their own image''+and so ''to examine, through the looking glass, the kaleidoscopic character of American culture.''

NO time to cook what you can't afford to buy?

As Face of Poor Changes, So Do Food Baskets
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

For years, public and nonprofit food assistance programs have been reporting a sharp rise in the number of working families using their services. But now, as working families are becoming as common visitors as the indigent elderly at the city's soup kitchens and food pantries, many program officials say an ambitious shift is under way in how food for the needy is delivered.

The conventional answer of a box full of donated canned fruit, rice and beans, and the odd piece of eggplant is being supplemented, and in some cases replaced with new options: complete premade meals for takeout, for example, or frozen family-size portions of chili and spaghetti sauce.

Driving the shift in strategy, experts and providers say, is a familiar social and economic phenomenon: the growing numbers of working poor turning up at the soup kitchens and pantries, in most cases single mothers with children, are so busy juggling jobs, commuting and child care that they have little time to cook the food they are given. "The face of poverty is a working woman with two children," said Robert Egger, the founder of D.C. Central Kitchen and an advocate for rethinking what goes into a charity food basket. The options most of the nation's poor have, he says, are to stand in line for a meal at a soup kitchen or to go to a local church to pick up a box of groceries assembled from donations.

Mr. Egger is running pilot projects with the United States Department of Agriculture and American Food Services Associates to create programs that would provide meals for families to pick up at high schools and colleges. A project that provides bag lunches to working mothers is already in operation.

Right now, few food pantries in the city could offer such women that convenience, but that is changing. Community Food Resources Center, which operates a soup kitchen and food pantry on West 116th street, just received a grant to buy an industrial-size flash freezer. The group hopes to expand food production at its soup kitchen and freeze some 440 meals daily that it will either give to families at its food pantry or deliver to other food providers across the city, according to Hiram Bonner, the center's director of programs.

We remind all doctors during this holiday season to gouge the hell out of their clients

Some Doctors Letting Patients Skip Co-Payments
By MILT FREUDENHEIM

For years, health plans have sought to control medical costs by negotiating fees with a group of preferred doctors and requiring patients to pay extra for going outside the network. But some doctors and clinics - eager to help hard-pressed patients or calculating that it can benefit their business - have begun to foil the cost-control efforts by waiving those extra charges.

The move by these providers to dispense with collecting what are known as coinsurance payments comes as employers and insurers try to discourage overuse of health care by making patients pay more costs from their own pockets. But those efforts - and the squeeze on doctors as health plans shrink payments for in-network care - are generating resistance, experts say.

Health plan members are "going out of network for surprisingly expensive medical services,'' said Tom Farley, who audits managed care plans across the country for the Towers Perrin consulting firm. That behavior suggests "some sort of tacit agreement between the provider and the patient to not bill for some of those out-of-pocket expenses,'' he said.

Dr. Michael O. Fleming, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said that doctors' efforts to find ways around the insurers' cost-control strategies are "a reaction to the ratcheting down of managed care fees.''

Doctors are waiving coinsurance payments for several reasons, analysts say: to recruit patients who would otherwise go to doctors on a health plan's preferred list; to help people struggling with the cost of care, and to reduce their own costs for processing insurance paperwork and dunning patients who are slow to pay.

These doctors can afford to pass up the payments because the out-of-network fees they collect from insurers often are higher than those they would collect as members of a health plan's network.

… Regularly waiving co-insurance payments or co-pays _ the $10 or $20 payments many plans impose for office visits - is against the rules in the government Medicare and Medicaid programs. A few states - Colorado, Georgia, Nevada, South Dakota and Texas - also prohibit the practice for patients covered by commercial insurance, according to Dennis M. Barry, a Washington lawyer who studies health care reimbursement issues.

Colorado and Georgia also forbid advertising the waivers to attract business. A handful of states have banned the waiver of co-payments and deductibles by dentists and chiropractors. And Ohio prohibits routine waivers of co-payments, but not deductibles, by physicians, pharmacists, psychologists, physical therapists, nurses and optometrists, according to a survey published last month by Mr. Barry and Lori Mihalich.

Waiving payments for indigent patients or to placate those who have complaints about their treatment "should not pose legal issues,'' however, they said.

A policy statement by the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs says that "physicians should forgive or waive the co-payment'' if it would pose "a barrier to needed care because of financial hardship.'' The statement warns, though, that "routine forgiveness or waiver of co-payments may constitute fraud under state and federal law.''

Don't get caught, that's all

Some Lessons in Black and White
12/21/2003 08:41 PM EDT

By DEBORAH MATHIS

Race can make for such messy business.

Take, for example, the current brouhaha at the University of Missouri, where the four-campus system’s first black president is embroiled in a controversy hot enough to evoke talk of resignation.

The ingredients are these: An interracial affair, a domestic abuse conviction, a black woman’s admonition, and a telephone recording.

The affair involved a former Missouri basketball player who is black and a white coed. The relationship ended with the man doing 60 days in jail for assaulting the woman.

…Despite this seeming acceptance of interracial relationships, black-white dating has not become blasé. Far from it. There is a simmering unease in the body politic about its implications which can hardly be ignored, history being what it is. However true the love may be, there is always the concern that black men seek white girlfriends or wives as trophies. One can say that the interracial element in the O.J. Simpson murder case did not raise the intrigue in the matter, or that the fact that Kobe Bryant’s accuser is white does not affect the mood of the case, but one would be delusional. We react to this stuff, whether with fascination, disgust, fear, hurt or envy.

To the degree that the society has not settled this issue for itself, it can be a problem for the parties directly involved. Even for the most determined and stalwart lovers, public attitudes can intrude and cause trouble. Black men, already on society’s hit list in so many ways, are particularly vulnerable to presumptions about their fitness and their intentions.

Thus did Carmento Floyd, the wife of the University of Missouri president, caution the black basketball player about his choice in women. In a telephone conversation recorded by the man’s jailers, Mrs. Floyd advised the man to look more toward Delta Sigma Theta, the famous black sorority, than to Delta Delta Delta, the famous white sorority, for dating prospects.

Because of that, white folks are accusing Mrs. Floyd of racism and, by extension, her husband and a family friend too. It could be political correctness gone amok; or payback for the January dismissal of a grade school teacher who told her class in a nearby town that she vehemently opposed interracial dating, marriage and procreation. One thing it wouldn’t seem to be is a last stand by white Missourians in defense of interracial dating. If that’s what it is, it begs examination, for it would be a phenomenon for damn sure.

I should let ol' Strom alone

Strom Thurmond had other Black Relatives
by Sean Yoes
Special to the NNPA from the Baltimore Afro-American

However, the Baltimore Afro-American newspapers reported in 1948, the same year South Carolina's then-Gov. James Strom Thurmond was the presidential nominee of the segregationist Dixiecrat Party, that he had several Black relatives, including an uncle and two cousins.

The AFRO initially reported in the edition dated Aug. 17, 1948, that a man named Robert Thurmond, from Morristown, N.J., was Strom Thurmond's first cousin.

''I certainly do know Strom, and he knows me, and he knows of our relationship because we were the only Thurmonds in Edgefield [South Carolina],'' stated Robert Thurmond.

Edgefield was the home of Strom Thurmond and his father, James E. ''Snip'' Thurmond, and, according to AFRO reporter Douglas Hall, Edgefield was the home to several other Thurmonds, many of whom were Black.

At the end of August in 1948, Hall traveled to Edgefield to find the rest of Strom Thurmond's Colored clan.

In the Aug. 24, 1948, edition of the AFRO, he reported the existence of the Rev. James R. Thurmond, a half-cousin of Strom Thurmond, Eva Thurmond Smith, another cousin, and Thomas Thurmond, Strom Thurmond's uncle.

''Why, I remember well when Gov. Thurmond's father used to visit my grandfather. I remember asking my grandfather, why did that White man always visit our home? My grandfather [Thomas Thurmond] told me that they were brothers,'' claimed Rev. Thurmond.

Douglas Hall reported further: ''It seems like everybody up there [Edgefield, S.C.] are Thurmonds. They are of all colors. Some are so White that you cannot tell them from the original Thurmonds. The only thing that surprises Colored Thurmonds is, why is it so important that they are related to the White Thurmonds? It is an old story and 'everybody in these parts knows it.'''

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - A 22-year-old Strom Thurmond having sex with his family’s 16-year-old Black maid should not be seen as an "affair," as it has been widely portrayed in the media, but rape, a well-respected Black sociologist says.

"You could call this a statutory rape because this person was about 16 or so when this happened," says Julia Hare, executive director of the Black Think Tank in San Francisco. "These are the types of things that we need to look at very seriously when we look at these double standards."

Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 78, a retired school teacher who now lives in Los Angeles, decided to tell her secret in order to bring closure to the subject and finally answer persistent questions from reporters.

For years, Thurmond and his family had remained silent and, in some cases, expressed doubt about the veracity of stories accusing him of fathering a Black daughter. Just days before the daughter had called a news conference to offer evidence that Thurmond was her biological father and to say she was willing to submit to a DNA test, the family finally confirmed the validity of her claim.

Washington-Williams says she had not come forward earlier because she didn’t want to ruin the political career of Thurmond, who died in June at the age of 100.

Thurmond was a virulent racist who ran for president in 1948 on a pro-segregationist platform. He said at the time: ''And I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.''

In 1957 – three years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in its famous "Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan." – Thurmond filibustered a civil rights bill for a record 24 hours and 18 minutes. The bill, which eventually passed, was the first civil rights legislation passed since 1875.

It provided the authority for establishing a civil rights office at the Department of Justice to enforce federal anti-bias laws and to investigate complaints of civil rights violations. It also provided for voting rights enforcement and established criminal civil rights violations.

NAACP Board Chairman Julian Bond notes the contradiction between a White Southerner who considered Blacks inferior while sexually exploiting an African-American teenager in private.

"It is a story, most of all, of great personal hypocrisy," says Bond. "How a man can preach racial separatism and practice interracial sex, in defiance of the then-current laws of his state and defiance of his entire public life. You wonder if Strom Thurmond and others like him ever had any convictions about anything at all."

Dec. 10th, International Human Rights Day

And yet…

International Human Rights Day was observed recently and I must confess that I have mixed feelings about the way that it is celebrated.

…But let’s bring it closer to home. Workers, internationally, are supposed to have a right to what is called freedom of association. This is suppose to mean, at least according to the International Labor Organization and the United Nations, that workers have a right to freely, and without interference from governments or employers, choose whether or not they want to join or form a labor union.

The United States, according to the National Labor Relations Act passed in 1935 is supposed to have a public policy that favors the self-organization of workers and their right to collective bargaining. Despite all of this, workers in the USA have no such right, yet when human rights are discussed by the Bush administration or other paragons of virtue, nothing is ever said about this.

Workers can attempt to join or form a union, get fired by the employer and it will often take years for them to get their jobs back unless there is massive pressure on the employer or government. Yet, this is not called a human rights abuse. In other words, we are permitted to have a law on the books that says that we can form or join unions, but in practice, this right can be denied and the powers at be don’t give a cuss.

Time to get some folks upset

The Black Commentator on our own domestic terrorists:

On Guns

Steve Gilliard (now with permalinks for your enjoyment) has an interesting write-up on guns and gun control. This is a long quote but Mr. Gilliard has a lot more for you.

Ugh

Just waking up.

Before I pass out again, I want to publicly thank Phephs. I think there's a touch of symbolism in choosing a fruitcake, but it was a very good fruitcake.

Many a truth is said in jest

Old Divides Growing in Dean, Centrist Rift
With some swipes at Democratic moderates, concerns mount over his ability to unite the party.
By Ronald Brownstein
Times Staff Writer

December 24, 2003

WASHINGTON — The rapidly escalating war of words between Howard Dean and the Democratic Party's leading centrists is reopening old ideological divides suppressed during Bill Clinton's presidency and raising new fears about Dean's ability to unite the party if he won the nomination for president.

Party centrists were stunned Monday when Dean denounced the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that provided many of the key ideas for Clinton's "New Democrat" agenda, as "the Republican wing of the Democratic Party."

Dean's comments came just days after he delivered a speech widely seen as accusing Clinton of conceding too much ground to Republicans. The sharp verbal volleys from Dean against party centrists may help energize his liberal base as the first primary contests approach next month in Iowa and New Hampshire. But even Democratic moderates who have been sympathetic to Dean's campaign worry he could be pushing the party toward an internal upheaval that would severely erode his ability to compete as a general–election nominee.

Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a Democratic political action committee, has been as close to Dean as any leading centrist in the party.

But after his latest criticism of the DLC, Rosenberg says, the front runner "has a choice. Is he going to present a new synthesis that incorporates all the best of all the traditions in the party … or is he going to be the leader of the counterrevolution?"

Added Leon E. Panetta, the former chief of staff under Clinton: "I think he's asking for serious trouble when he attacks Clinton and attacks the DLC. Whether you like their positions or not, the reality is you can't afford to divide the Democratic Party at this point. You've got a tough enough job fighting George Bush."

During a campaign stop Tuesday in Seabrook, N.H., where he received an endorsement from the 1,000–member New Hampshire chapter of United Auto Workers, Dean said he stood by his remarks about the DLC. On Monday, he called the DLC "sort of the Republican part of the Democratic Party … the Republican wing of the Democratic Party."

"The staff of the DLC has injected themselves into the race because they're supporting other candidates, but I think the membership of the DLC is anxious to take back the White House and understands that we have to be unified to do that," Dean said in Seabrook.

"I thought I was having a little fun at their expense. They've had eight months of fun at my expense, I figured I owed them a day at their expense."

Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, said Tuesday that Dean was joking in his criticism.

Not a good day for me to be operating machinery

I just screwed up the coffee maker. I also broke the bleeding edge version of MTClient...like, BROKE it, not just a new thing doesn't work.

And no one's listening because it's holiday eve.

This ought to appeal to Republicans

As it turns out, someone was listening (see the above whine), but it was while I was creating posts with the comments turned off (again, see the above whine, re: machinery this time).

It was Luis, from Colorado Luis:

Serious question: Isn't the personal loan a big campaign finance loophole? In this case, later his wife can use her money to pay off the loan?

You know all about the letter vs. spirit of the law thing.

Also, didn't Schwarzenegger loan his campaign a bunch of his own money so that his big donors that would turn people off could wait until after the election to contribute?

I don't know his motivation, but it sounds right and fits the actual events as they developed.

Kerry Lends Campaign $6.4 Million
House Mortgaged As Funds Dwindle

By Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A06

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) announced yesterday that he borrowed $6.4 million to lend to his financially strapped presidential campaign with less than a month to go to the crucial Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses.

"Senator Kerry's personal commitment to the race is unquestioned," Mary Beth Cahill, his campaign manager, said in a prepared statement. "John Kerry will win the nomination and then beat George Bush in November."

Kerry is trying to finish no lower than second in both Iowa, where he is running third in most polls, and in New Hampshire, where he is in second place according to many surveys. Kerry aides did not rule out additional borrowing, depending on campaign needs.

Kerry rejected public financing of his presidential primary campaign, which would have provided him at least $4.5 million that he now forgoes. By rejecting the subsidies, Kerry does not have to abide by state spending limits in New Hampshire and Iowa, or by an overall primary spending limit of about $46 million.

President Bush and former Vermont governor Howard Dean also rejected public financing, but, unlike Kerry, they are raising additional money from private contributors, not their own resources.

Kerry borrowed the $6.4 million from the Mellon Trust of New England, which granted a mortgage on his half of the home that Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, own on Beacon Hill's Louisburg Square.

The mortgage features an adjustable rate starting at 3.125 percent, and the payments will be interest-only for the first 10 years of the 30-year loan. According to calculations by the Mortgage Bankers Association, Kerry's monthly payments during the first year will be $16,667, or $200,000 a year.

Kerry, whose 2002 income was $144,091, according to tax returns, must pay off the mortgage himself and cannot use his wife's fortune, estimated at $500 million. The $6.4 million is a loan to the campaign. Kerry can be repaid in full with contributions from individual donors until the primary season ends at the Democratic convention in July. After that, the campaign would be allowed to repay him a maximum of $250,000, according to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Asked how Kerry will meet the monthly payments, an aide said that "he is a man of substantial means."

I can't improve on the editorial title

Political Science

Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A14

OVER THE PAST several days, the Bush administration has changed its mind about the scientific merits of two environmental issues. For this administration, which has so often preferred to stick to bad ideas rather than admit they are bad, and which has seemed so addicted to political manipulation of science, such changes are worth noting -- particularly as both are still open to further manipulation.

The first change came out of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose new administrator, Mike Leavitt, announced last week his intention to reverse a previous proposed rule that would have removed protections from the nation's rivers, streams and wetlands. The second came out of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which produced a biological assessment of the Missouri River that concurred, at least in part, with previous assessments. This was welcome because the scientists responsible had been appointed to cast a "fresh eye" on the issue, and many feared they would come up with answers more acceptable to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and shipping companies rather than the wildlife that live in and along the river.

In both cases, applause for the "change of heart" must be accompanied by caveats. This is particularly true in the case of the Missouri River assessment, which conceded that river flows, now mechanically controlled, should be made to mimic natural flows -- high in the spring and low in the summer -- so that several nearly extinct species of fish and birds can survive. Despite this concession, the report left open several loopholes that could allow the Corps to modify significantly the change in water flow. The extraordinary feature in this instance is that few dispute the fact that the natural flows favored by environmentalists are probably economically advantageous as well, or that some of the proposals to compensate for artificially high flows with artificial wildlife habitats will likely cost far more than merely altering the level of the water.

In the end, the same cost-benefit analysis may hold for the wetlands issue too: Adding it up, the costs of cleaning up dirty water, plus the damage to fishing and sporting industries, probably outweigh whatever economic benefits would be gained by allowing developers to create more water pollution. For that reason it is important that EPA follow through on the administration's change of heart by writing directives to the Corps' field offices in the same spirit.

In neither case is it clear whether politics, economics or pressures from the hunting and fishing lobby have led to the administration's ostensible change of heart. But in both cases, it is absolutely clear that the scientific pronouncements must be followed up with more substantive policy changes, if they are not meant to be pre-election window dressing.

BushCo personnel management techniques trickle on down

Punished for the Truth
Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A14

UNLESS WISER HEADS in the upper reaches of the Bush administration prevail, underlings in the Interior Department are about to deliver a low blow to honesty and integrity in government. For responding with the truth to questions from The Post and other news outlets about staffing in her department, U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers has been placed on leave and notified that superiors in the National Park Service and Interior want her fired. And what was the chief's transgression? She said her understaffed department had to curtail critical patrols in Park Service jurisdictions beyond the Mall, such as major parkways and crime-ridden U.S. parkland in neighborhoods, because of Interior Department orders requiring more officers to guard downtown national shrines. The impending action ought to be reversed. Ms. Chambers should be commended for speaking up for public safety. The Interior Department underlings trying to muzzle her are the ones who should be on their way out the door.

There is more at stake than the career of a police chief who is highly regarded by officers under her command. The effect of firing Ms. Chambers because she spoke up with courage about threats to the public she is sworn to protect will have a chilling effect on public servants who believe it is their obligation to be honest about the needs of their jobs. The National Park Service officials who want the chief gone accuse her of improperly lobbying Congress and disclosing secret budget details through her public comments. If the Bush administration lets the Park Service get away with those flimsy excuses, then the White House has been really bamboozled. Let's face it: The truth embarrassed the chief's higher-ups. So they retaliated.

The chief, a veteran police officer who has served in the Prince George's police department and later was police chief in Durham, N.C., intends to defend herself, and she should. The park police department is a critical link in Washington area law enforcement. To downgrade it, as Park Service and Interior Department officials seem intent on doing, could well threaten security in the capital and create serious security gaps that area police departments -- already severely stretched -- may not be able to fill. Ms. Chambers has a fight on her hands, but she should not have to take it on by herself. Law enforcement in the Washington region, the career federal service and the public have a stake in the outcome. The White House should intervene to prevent this injustice from taking place.

Desperate times call for stoopit measures

White House Faulted on Uranium Claim
Intelligence Warnings Disregarded, President's Advisory Board Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 24, 2003; Page A01

The President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board has concluded that the White House made a questionable claim in January's State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain nuclear materials because of its desperation to show that Hussein had an active program to develop nuclear weapons, according to a well–placed source familiar with the board's findings.

In the speech Jan. 28, President Bush cited British intelligence in asserting that Hussein had tried to buy uranium from an unnamed country in Africa. The White House later said the claim should not have been made, after reports that the intelligence community expressed doubts it was true. After reviewing the matter for several months, the intelligence board –– chaired by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft –– has determined that there was "no deliberate effort to fabricate" a story, the source said. Instead, the source said, the board believes the White House was so anxious "to grab onto something affirmative" about Hussein's nuclear ambitions that it disregarded warnings from the intelligence community that the claim was questionable.

The source said that at the time of the State of the Union speech, there was no organized system at the White House to vet intelligence, and the informal system that was followed did not work in the case of that speech. The White House has since established procedures for handling intelligence in presidential speeches by including a CIA officer in the speechwriting process.

MTClient version 0.3

Can't resist.

My MTClient software has come quite a way. I have some fit–and–finish issues, and three major functions to implement (save and restore posts, post previews and preferences).

But the software is most eminently useful. I've been posting here with the development versions for the last few, and I've carved away a lot of obstructions. Like you can drag and drop text between the main text and extended text editors. And from Mozilla to the editor. You can actually do it from IE, but it comes over as rich text with embedded hypertext, fonts and such...not good for my purposes. So with IE you have to "paste unformatted" until I get a better way of doing that. Couple of days, I'd say.

Did I mention the spell checker? It does that squiggly line thing, which is possible to shut off in favor of bulk spell checking. And there's a thesaurus just because I wanted one. The spell checker I needed. Both need smoother integration of their configuration but there they are.

I honestly think MTClient is already better for posting to Movable Type blogs than w.Bloggar (because it accesses all MT post fields), Zempt (because it handles Microsoft extended ASCII properly and the controls, being native Windows controls, behave exactly as a Windows user expects), and SharpMT (because it has the spell checker and actually retrieves and edits posts rather than launching your browser when you want to edit a post).

How angry are you

Too angry for words? Then you need help. Check out Insultmonger.

The Insult Index is well organized. Regular P6 readers may want to go straight to the political insults: Everyone from Chester A. Arthur to Woodrow Wilson is covered. There's a dictionary of offensive slang, and Swearasaurus will teach you swearing, profanity, obscenity, blasphemy, cursing, cussing, and insulting in 131 languages. And if you're not speechless but just lazy, they have a series of random insult generators for several purposes, including a Shakesperian insult generator toucan download for use on your own site.

Cancel your vacation until at least February

Canada Upholds Pot Restriction
By David Ljunggren
Reuters
Tuesday, December 23, 2003; 2:26 PM

OTTAWA – Canada's Supreme Court upheld Tuesday laws banning the use of marijuana –– just months before Ottawa is expected to introduce legislation scrapping those very same laws.

Three men convicted of possessing pot had appealed their cases all the way to the nation's top court, saying the threat of imprisonment for using the drug in private was excessive and breached their constitutional rights to life and liberty.

But the court, in a 6–3 split decision, said laws banning the possession and trafficking of pot were reasonable because the drug was widely considered to be dangerous.

"It cannot be said that the prohibition on marijuana possession is arbitrary or irrational, although the wisdom of the prohibition and its related penalties is always open to reconsideration by Parliament itself," it said in the ruling.

"There is no free–standing constitutional right to smoke pot for recreational purposes."

Prime Minister Paul Martin said when Parliament restarted in February, the government would reintroduce legislation to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

More context

The NY Times has an article that give a little more detail about the "diversity penalty" built into the "No Child Left Behind" initiatives. The article is based on the same report discussed below and in Different colored hoops to jump through

Picking on the comments again

On the front page because the comments are configured to strip out table, tr and td tags.

Did you read "Different colored hoops to jump through"? Here's a select quote:

Manzanita and Golden Gate both soared about 50 points this year on California's Academic Performance Index. Both hover around 614 on the 1,000– point index. And test scores rose higher than expected at both. The schools are nearly twins in academic performance.

…Golden Gate, with two subgroups –– black and low–income students –– met all of its federally required academic goals this year.

Manzanita, with five subgroups –– English learners and black, Asian American, Latino and low–income students –– did not, though it came close. Had six more black students scored at the "proficient" level in math, Manzanita would not have to accept state help as part of a federally mandated program for underperformers.

I thought I'd give some context on the two schools in the article I linked to.

First Golden Gate Elementary, the school deemed acceptable by NCLB standards:

Now Manzanita Elementary which was deemed to have come up short:

Now, since Manzanita has 304 Black students, those six students that, had they scored at the "proficient" level in math, would have brought the school rating up to an acceptable level, represents 2 per cent of the Black students in the school.

Two percent.

And we don't know if they were all in the same grade or what. Nor do we know by how much these students missed the mark. So it's hard to say a whole lot about the situation based on the article. I had to go to the Oakland Unified School District's official web page to say this much.

What can notbe said is that the school has failed Black students because of this ill–defined two percent. Which is fortunate, since that's not what the article was about.

The wise man speaketh

Nuclear proliferation begins at home

Observers Fault U.S. for Pursuing Mini-Nukes
Critics say American 'double standard' will undermine efforts to curb nuclear arms.
By Douglas Frantz
Times Staff Writer

December 23, 2003

VIENNA — Research on a new generation of precision atomic weapons by the Bush administration threatens to undermine international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear arms and to tarnish recent successes, according to diplomats and nonproliferation experts.

The criticism focuses on the administration's decision to lay the groundwork for developing low-yield weapons — known as mini-nukes — while pursuing President Bush's doctrine of preemptive strikes against rogue states.

The diplomats and independent experts said Washington's strategy weakens support for more stringent controls at a time when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty faces serious challenges from North Korea and Iran and amid widespread fears of terrorists acquiring atomic weapons. The U.S. strategy, critics say, may cause other countries to pursue nuclear arms.

"The U.S. follows a double standard that allows it to develop and threaten to use nuclear weapons while denying them to smaller countries," said Hussein Haniff, Malaysia's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "We do not know whether the nuclear nonproliferation treaty can survive with these U.S. policies."

Haniff heads a group of 13 countries that constitute a nonaligned bloc on the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors. The bloc is often at odds with the United States and last month opposed U.S. efforts to declare Iran in violation of the nonproliferation treaty.

The Bush administration argues that mini-nukes would provide flexibility to respond to changing threats and small-scale conflicts that do not require full-size nuclear armaments.

Nonetheless, some U.S. allies are alarmed. A senior Western diplomat called the prospect of mini-nukes "politically stupid" and said it would complicate U.S. security by weakening support for tougher nuclear controls.

Anger over the U.S. policy has risen steadily since the spring when the administration requested funding for research on mini-nukes, in effect seeking a reversal of a 1993 ban on research and development of low-yield atomic weapons. After much wrangling, Congress approved the bill last month, granting $7.5 million, half of what the administration had sought.

The weapons would be designed to penetrate underground bunkers presumed to conceal weapons of mass destruction or command centers. Pentagon planners say the low yield would limit nuclear fallout, a claim some scientists dispute.

Administration officials have said the research into mini-nukes was insignificant compared with its larger arms control effort, which would cut the U.S. nuclear stockpile by two-thirds by 2012.

To be filed under "Fucking spare me, already"

Limbaugh's lawyer says maid blackmailed broadcaster over prescription drugs
JILL BARTON, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

(12-23) 03:06 PST WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) --

Rush Limbaugh's lawyer said the conservative radio commentator was "bled dry" by a former maid who demanded $4 million and threatened to reveal his addiction to prescription painkillers.

Attorney Roy Black said Monday that Limbaugh could not complain to authorities about the maid's demand because they would use the information against him, though the maid and her husband eventually went public anyway.

Different colored hoops to jump through

Standards tougher on diverse schools
More 'subgroups' mean more hurdles
Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Consider this pair of Oakland elementary schools:

Manzanita and Golden Gate both soared about 50 points this year on California's Academic Performance Index. Both hover around 614 on the 1,000- point index. And test scores rose higher than expected at both. The schools are nearly twins in academic performance.

But under new federal education rules known as No Child Left Behind, Golden Gate is worth attending; Manzanita is not. Labeled a "school in need of improvement," Manzanita -- like thousands of other schools across California and the nation -- must accept state help and tell all students they may change schools.

The reason for the apparent double standard: Manzanita is more diverse than Golden Gate, says a new study of how the federal rules affect California schools. The rules require that large "subgroups" of students in each school meet academic goals. Each ethnic group, as well as low-income students and English learners, must score at a certain level or the school is subject to federal sanctions.

That amounts to a "diversity penalty," says the study due out today by researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California. More than 7,000 California schools, virtually all the state's schools, were included in the study.

The researchers want the federal government to let schools avoid sanctions even if subgroups miss academic targets. But defenders of the system say no one should be exempt from meeting high academic standards.

According to the study, California schools with the wealthiest students have an 83 percent chance of meeting their academic targets if they have only one subgroup. The more subgroups there are, the more hurdles the school must overcome, and the more its chance of meeting targets drops.

With six subgroups, even wealthy schools have only a 53 percent chance of meeting targets, the study found. The pattern sharpens at schools with poorer students, so that schools with 75 percent or more poor students and six subgroups have only a 16 percent chance of meeting targets, the study found.

Golden Gate, with two subgroups -- black and low-income students -- met all of its federally required academic goals this year.

Manzanita, with five subgroups -- English learners and black, Asian American, Latino and low-income students -- did not, though it came close. Had six more black students scored at the "proficient" level in math, Manzanita would not have to accept state help as part of a federally mandated program for underperformers.

California quake

6.5 quake razes landmark, kills two in Paso Robles
Alan Gathright, Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Paso Robles, San Luis Obispo County -- When the earth heaved and the 111-year-old building began to wobble, life or death came down to which door you picked to run through.

The door onto 12th Street led to safety. The door onto Park Street did not.

The 1892 Mastagni Building -- a two-story landmark with a 15-foot-high clock tower on top and unreinforced masonry on its front -- was full of customers and employees of a dress store and a jewelry store.

As the rolling vibration built to a roar, eight customers and five employees inside Pan Jewelers turned to 62-year-old owner Nick Sherwin, one of the civic leaders whose efforts led to the preservation of the old building and the historic shopping district.

"They were looking at me, and I just said, it's time to get out, no ifs ands or buts,'' Sherwin said.

The customers and staff fled through the 12th Street door.

But nearby, two women in Ann's Dress Shop tried to run out through the Park Street door.

As they did, the roof and the clock tower collapsed on top of them, crushing them. They were identified as Marilyn Zafuto, 55, of Paso Robles, and Jennifer Myrick, 19, of Atascadero.

Growing up more slowly

When I see this and the story about people living with their parents an extra 10-12 years, it seems to me like two expressions of a single trend.

Arielle Wilcott, 17, knows the facts of life. Her mother gave her the "birds and the bees" talk for the first time when she was 13, and the two women continue an open dialogue on love, sex and relationships.

Several years ago, Arielle's junior high school in Sherman, Tex., brought in a health educator to discuss sex, sexually transmitted diseases and birth control. At the end of ninth grade, Arielle and her classmates participated in an assembly that encouraged abstinence.

Combined with what she has read, seen on television and discussed with her friends, Arielle said she believed that she had been thoroughly "sex educated." That is why she has decided to wait to have sex until she grows older.

"I don't want to be forced to take care of a child that I'm not ready for or get an S.T.D.," said Arielle, a high school senior who likes art and plans to be an animator after college.

"As far as sex," she said, "it'll happen someday, but just not today. Besides, if I came home pregnant, I'd be lying on the ground, outlined in chalk." [P6: I wonder how large this figured in her position]

Like Arielle, a record number of teenagers have received the message, "Don't bring home a baby." Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in its annual tally of birth statistics, announced that the teenage birthrate had declined 30 percent over 10 years to a historic low of 43 births per 1,000. African-American teenagers showed the sharpest declines, down more than 40 percent since 1991. For young black teenagers, from 15 to 17, the rate was half, to 40 births per 1,000 in 2002 from 83.6 per 1,000 in 1991 .

These declines, combined with a decrease in abortions among teenagers, points to a promising trend: fewer teenagers are becoming pregnant. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, in women 15 to 19, the pregnancy rate dropped from 11.5 per 1,000 in 1991 to 8.5 in 1999, the latest year with available statistics.

"When you see the abortion rate decline in tandem with birthrate, this essentially means that teenagers are being more successful in avoiding pregnancy, both that end in abortion and end in birth," said David Landry, senior research associate at the institute. It estimates that in women 15 to 19, the abortion rate declined, from 40 per 1,000 in 1990 to 24 in 1999.

Experts in the field agree that educational efforts have been crucial to reducing the numbers.

…Even as advocates, health educators and, of course, parents, celebrate the good news, the debate continues over what type of sex education can take credit.

The two sides are firm.

Abstinence-only education, which the Bush administration supports, teaches that refraining from sex is the only way to prevent pregnancy and diseases. Programs that receive federal financing are not allowed to advise using contraception to reduce the risk of pregnancy or condoms to protect against disease. In 2003, the federal government devoted $117 million to abstinence education.

Comprehensive sex education, on the other hand, teaches that while abstinence is preferable, young people need information about sex and contraception. The Guttmacher Institute says that two-thirds of public school districts have policies to teach sex education, and that 35 percent of those require that abstinence be promoted as the sole option for unmarried people. Birth control and condoms can be mentioned just in terms of failure rates.

Arielle Wilcott says her ninth-grade workshop encouraged just abstinence until marriage, while presenting failure rates for birth control.

SCO better stop whining and get their proof together

Get the proof the court ordered and all SCO's credibility problems go away. Fail to do so, and SCO goes away.

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 22 - Novell Inc. has quietly registered for the copyrights on many versions of the Unix computer operating system that the SCO Group already says it owns, further muddying the water surrounding a dispute that has embroiled the Linux open source world for almost a year.

SCO, which has sued in an effort to capture hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees and damages from I.B.M. and other companies, said it owned the rights to the Unix operating system through a transfer from Novell dating back to 1995. SCO asserts that Linux, a variant of Unix that is distributed free and has been making significant gains in corporate computing, violates SCO's license and copyright.

SCO reacted on Monday to Novell's decision to register for the Unix copyrights by calling the move a backdoor act to claim code that is rightfully SCO's. "We see this as a fraudulent attempt by Novell to get something they don't have," said Darl C. McBride, president and chief executive of SCO. "It's fraudulent to now go and say they have these'' copyright registrations.

Mr. McBride contended that Novell was acting as a stalking horse for I.B.M., the biggest seller of Linux to corporations. "It's not just Novell,'' Mr. McBride said. "It's an attack by I.B.M."

An I.B.M. spokesman declined to comment, noting that the company is in litigation with SCO. SCO filed a breach of contract and trade secrets lawsuit against I.B.M. last March, accusing I.B.M. of illegally incorporating Unix code in Linux. In that suit, SCO is asking for $1 billion in damages. I.B.M. has denied the charges, saying that SCO has not shown that the Linux software violates any copyrights.

On Dec. 5, a Utah court told SCO that it had 30 days to demonstrate to the court exactly what parts of the Linux code I.B.M. is using that infringe on its rights.

Novell executives confirmed that the company filed for copyright registrations this fall, but declined to provide details. "Novell believes it owns the copyrights in Unix, and has applied for and received copyright registrations pertaining to Unix consistent with that position," Novell said in a statement. "SCO has been well aware that Novell continues to assert ownership of the Unix copyrights."

Don and Saddam sitting in a tree

Rumsfeld Made Iraq Overture in '84 Despite Chemical Raids
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 — As a special envoy for the Reagan administration in 1984, Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the defense secretary, traveled to Iraq to persuade officials there that the United States was eager to improve ties with President Saddam Hussein despite his use of chemical weapons, newly declassified documents show.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who ran a pharmaceutical company at the time, was tapped by Secretary of State George P. Shultz to reinforce a message that a recent move to condemn Iraq's use of chemical weapons was strictly in principle and that America's priority was to prevent an Iranian victory in the Iran-Iraq war and to improve bilateral ties.

During that war, the United States secretly provided Iraq with combat planning assistance, even after Mr. Hussein's use of chemical weapons was widely known. The highly classified program involved more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who shared intelligence on Iranian deployments, bomb-damage assessments and other crucial information with Iraq.

The disclosures round out a picture of American outreach to the Iraqi government, even as the United States professed to be neutral in the eight-year war, and suggests a private nonchalance toward Mr. Hussein's use of chemicals in warfare. Mr. Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials have cited Iraq's use of poisonous gas as a main reason for ousting Mr. Hussein.

The documents, which were released as part of a declassification project by the National Security Archive, and are available on the Web at www.nsarchive.org, provide details of the instructions given to Mr. Rumsfeld on his second trip to Iraq in four months. The notes of Mr. Rumsfeld's encounter with Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, remain classified, but officials acknowledged that it would be unusual if Mr. Rumsfeld did not carry out the instructions.

A recognized threat

Terrorism and Liberty

After four years of work, a federal commission on terrorism issued its final report [PDF] last week. [P6: Yup, that's a link to the report itself. Thought I'd add that.] The report was unremarkable except for one recommendation that shone brightly through the usual thicket of bureaucratic prose. Aggressive antiterrorism policies, the report suggested, when combined with increasingly sophisticated surveillance technologies, could have a "chilling effect" on the right to privacy and other fundamental civil liberties. To prevent that from happening, the commission recommended that the White House establish a bipartisan panel to review how constitutional guarantees would be affected by all new laws and regulations aimed at enhancing national security.

The report appeared only days before two federal courts rebuked the Bush administration for ignoring constitutional restraints in the name of fighting terrorism. The commission did not directly criticize the administration's policies, but it urged the government to take special precautions to protect against the infringement of basic rights. The report was also notable for the fact that it came from a fairly conservative panel consisting mainly of law-enforcement and municipal officials and headed by James Gilmore III, a former Republican governor of Virginia.

Created after the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the commission is one of two federal panels examining terrorism. A second panel, which is examining the Sept. 11 attacks, will report in May. The Gilmore group praised many aspects of the government's response to 9/11, but said there was plenty of room for improvement in terms of intelligence gathering and coordinating the efforts of state, local and federal governments. These complaints had been expected. What was not expected, and most welcome, was the emphasis on civil liberties and the commission's reminder that these liberties and security concerns are not mutually exclusive.

Here's a frightening thought

The Rule of Law and the War on Terror
By RUTH WEDGWOOD

WASHINGTON - In the ongoing war with Al Qaeda, America's civic ideals should not frustrate an effective defense.

What is the government to do, for example, when it knows of catastrophic threats or dangers to Americans through intelligence sources, yet is unable to prove its case in a criminal trial against those planning such attacks?

Consider the case of Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who the government says was working for Al Qaeda in a radioactive bomb plot. The government's main informants about Mr. Padilla are still sequestered abroad. Without these senior Qaeda members available to appear in court, Mr. Padilla cannot be charged with a crime. So shortly after returning to America from abroad in May 2002, he was designated an "enemy combatant" and taken into government custody. Last week a federal appeals court ordered him released within 30 days.

According to government accounts, Mr. Padilla moved abroad in 1998, traveling to Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. He wasn't traveling to see the wonders of the world. In 2001, the government says, Mr. Padilla met in Afghanistan with Abu Zubaydah, a senior Qaeda planner. Mr. Padilla offered to detonate a radioactive bomb in an American city, and Mr. Zubaydah sent him to Pakistan to learn about making bombs.

In 2002, according to a government affidavit filed in open court, Mr. Padilla discussed how to attack the United States in terrorist operations with other operatives of Al Qaeda in Pakistan, again with Abu Zubaydah's approval. Plans included a "dirty bomb" attack and bombings of American hotels and train stations.

All of these schemes might seem beyond the capacity of a street gang graduate. But one of Al Qaeda's hallmarks has been attracting and teaching local jihadists, marrying Al Qaeda's perverse set of skills to the moral naïveté of a young recruit.

Mr. Padilla was told to return to the United States to carry out reconnaissance, the government says, or to conduct attacks on American sites. On May 8, 2002, he flew from Pakistan to Switzerland, and then to Chicago. Meanwhile, in March 2002, Abu Zubaydah was taken into custody by intelligence agents in Pakistan, and may have spilled the beans on Mr. Padilla's involvement.

The government faced an extraordinary dilemma upon Mr. Padilla's return to the United States. Federal rules of evidence do not permit the consideration of intelligence reports as proof for criminal convictions, no matter how reliable the informant. And any effort to hold Mr. Padilla as a grand jury witness was bound to be temporary, since he could not be forced to testify without immunity.

Hence, President Bush invoked the wartime power delegated by Congress. In response to 9/11, Congress's joint resolution, dated Sept. 18, 2001, authorized the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against "those organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001" in order to "prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States" (emphasis added).

This Congressional action, together with the president's constitutional responsibility as commander in chief to protect the United States against attacks, authorized the American military campaign against the Taliban and Qaeda members around the world. Congress surely intended that Qaeda operatives who are planning direct attacks against American targets should also be restrained, at least when no other legal method is available. Mr. Padilla was caught in hot pursuit returning from Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In a split decision, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has now concluded otherwise. Congress apparently meant no such thing. Though a lower court judge upheld the president's power to intercept incipient attacks, subject to suitable habeas corpus review, the appeals panel has supposed that Congress provided no means to stop Al Qaeda operatives like Mr. Padilla from entering the United States to carry out attacks — except by means of a criminal prosecution. An operative of Al Qaeda must be caught carrying "weapons or explosives," the judges said, in order to be seen as "actively engaged in armed conflict against the United States."

This sanguine view overlooks the Eichmann-like division of labor common in Qaeda operations. Target-spotting missions and trips to acquire munitions are part of armed conflict. And the government says Jose Padilla volunteered to carry out the stateside attacks directly.

The appellate court supposes, without any basis in the record, that there was no "imminent danger" of attack, because a grand jury warrant kept Mr. Padilla at a Manhattan correctional center for four weeks. But what the court did not say is that had Mr. Padilla been let go after the warrant expired, he would have been free to continue his martial tasks.

The judges appropriately considered a little-known but important guarantee called the "Non-Detention Act" — passed in 1971. It says that "No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an act of Congress." The puzzle is why the judges are so cocksure that Congress's nearly unanimous vote to go to war against Al Qaeda doesn't qualify as an authorizing act of Congress.

Of course, it would be preferable to know everything that is important in life by standards of "beyond a reasonable doubt." But imagine if the intelligence dots had been replete and connected on Sept. 10, 2001. What if we knew, from out-of-court sources, the names of Qaeda operatives who were planning to hijack the jet-fueled airplanes for attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Even then, we would likely have lacked admissible criminal proof. By the logic of last week's decision, the president could not have held the hijackers as combatants — even after they had entered the United States, even with habeas corpus review of the president's decision, until the moment they appeared at Logan Airport with box cutters.

Perhaps, unconsciously, we think the war is over. The Al Qaeda network's recent bombings in Kenya and Turkey argue the opposite. Osama bin Laden's "spider hole" has not yet been found. The muttered warnings of his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were broadcast last week, just before the government's heightened terror alert: "We are still chasing the Americans and their allies everywhere, including their homeland."

One would prefer to think this was bluster. But the training camps of Osama bin Laden created a dangerous and far-flung network that criminal law alone may not suffice to vanquish.

Ruth Wedgwood, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, is professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University.

Safer?

Saddam Hussein was captured. And the terror status goes to orange.

Movable Type News

MOVABLE TYPE 2.65

A security issue has been found in Movable Type's XML-RPC server. We suggest that all users of Movable Type upgrade their installations to fix this issue.

We have released a new version of Movable Type, version 2.65, to fix this problem. Version 2.65 also includes the mt-send-entry.cgi fix released about one month ago [1].

In addition, version 2.65 includes an Atom syndication template in the default templates, along with an auto-discovery tag in the main index template. It also includes a couple of new tags used for the Atom feeds. If you're upgrading, you can get the syndication template from the default template list [2].

You can download the 2.65 upgrade from the download page [3] and follow the standard upgrade instructions [4].

If you'd rather just fix the XML-RPC security issue, you can replace lib/MT/XMLRPCServer.pm on your server with the new version of XMLRPCServer.pm at

http://www.movabletype.org/downloads/XMLRPCServer.zip

This is a ZIP file. Extract it and upload the version of XMLRPCServer.pm within to your server in ASCII mode.

We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad. Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more, we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned on the Six Log, we're focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro.

The next version of Movable Type will be version 3.0, a significant and free upgrade. Many oft-requested features will be integrated into this release, including:

* Comment registration. As a response to both comment spam and to the increased usage of Movable Type on large community sites, we'll be adding the option to restrict comments to registered users.

* Improved comment and TrackBack management features.

* New API hooks for plugin developers. Plugins will now be able to hook into many more pieces of Movable Type, including adding callbacks for saving and removing objects, building application methods with integration into the UI, and hooking into the publishing process. This opens up possibilities for plugins to add even more advanced functionality than they're able to do now.

* User interface rebuilt using CSS. We've seen with TypePad that a CSS-based interface gives users very fast application response times, and gives us a flexible interface for making application-wide changes, and we want to give this same speed and flexibility to Movable Type users.

* Support for the Atom API. We've already added Atom syndication feed support in version 2.65 of Movable Type, and we'll be adding publishing support for the API in 3.0.

In addition to the above, we'll be integrating some features into 3.0 that we're not yet ready to announce, but which we know will be very exciting to MT users. Additionally, for those interested in posting from mobile devices, we expect this to be a welcome release.

Movable Type 3.0 will be a free download and upgrade. We have full-time engineering resources devoted to this new version, and we plan to have a beta release in Q1 of 2004.

Nuff said

Health care again

Shortsighted States Are Putting Health Care on the Chopping Block
Ronald Brownstein

December 22, 2003

The number of Americans without health insurance now equals the population of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois and North Carolina combined. From 2000 through 2002 alone, the number of uninsured Americans jumped by nearly 4 million, to 43.5 million overall. Today almost one in six Americans lacks health insurance.

And the problem is about to get worse.

Americans obtain health insurance from two principal sources: employers and government programs. Employers provide most of the coverage, but they are retrenching under pressure from double-digit increases in health-insurance premiums.

The share of Americans receiving health coverage from their employers has declined in each of the last two years, as higher premiums encourage businesses to either pass on more of the bill to their workers (which means fewer buy insurance) or drop coverage altogether.

The only reason the number of Americans without insurance hasn't increased even faster is that public programs, like Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, are providing coverage to nearly 4 million more people today than in 2000, many of them children.

But now the public programs are facing debilitating cutbacks too. And the result will be a continuing rise in the number of uninsured Americans — even if the recovering economy slows the loss of health insurance on the job.

In Diebold We Trust

NOT.

EVEN THOUGH experts continue to raise questions about the vulnerability of touch-screen voting systems to fraud and computer glitches, Maryland election officials seem determined to press a flawed plan to adopt them. The state is buying into a system that has come under increasing scrutiny since July, when researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University cited numerous vulnerabilities in touch-screen technology. They determined that, among other shortcomings, the computer code in the voting machines made by Diebold Elections Systems was anything but hacker-proof; that an outsider could tamper with the program, and the tampering would be difficult to detect.

That was the first red flag, enough to prompt Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) to order a review by Science Applications International Corp., which also concluded that the system was "at high risk of compromise." Then, last month, computer scientist Aviel D. Rubin of the Johns Hopkins team reiterated his criticism, telling the state House Ways and Means Committee that a computer programmer could switch 10 percent of the votes from one candidate to another and leave no traces.

As if this weren't enough to generate uneasiness, Diebold's chief executive, an active Republican fundraiser, has been quoted as saying he is committed to "helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes" to President Bush next year. Then there's the report of an e-mail found in files apparently stolen from the firm that recommended charging Maryland "out the yin-yang" if the state were to ask that machines be equipped to produce paper printouts that can be verified by the voters.

Maryland ought to be able to negotiate a fair price for the cost of adding printers, and paper records ought to be a requirement, regardless of which company does the job. In California, the secretary of state has announced that all electronic voting machines must include paper printouts by 2006. Maryland Del. Karen S. Montgomery (D-Montgomery) has drafted legislation that would require voter-verified paper records. Voters would be allowed to correct errors they find on the printouts of their votes. The bill also would require random checks of the paper records in 2 percent of election precincts against the computer records, to search for possible tampering.

Before committing itself to a suspect system, Maryland at the least should insist on the kinds of protection sought by Ms. Montgomery. Mr. Ehrlich should join in putting these safeguards on the books and in conducting a further review of the arrangement with Diebold.

If you're not part of the solution

Look Who's Piling On
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A24

NO SOONER HAD Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) outlined a thoughtful tax reform-budget package than out with harsh criticism came the last two people who should be taking potshots: former Republican governors James S. Gilmore III and Sen. George Allen. Their collective financial record during a period of extraordinary economic growth managed to stick Virginia with unprecedented deficits that Mr. Warner has spent most of his time trying to erase.

Mr. Allen was fortunate to enjoy boom years during his term. But he pushed for a tax cut that the General Assembly turned back when business leaders objected strongly. They said the cut would have done serious damage to the financing of education, which would harm Virginia's reputation as having a first-class education system and in turn hurt efforts to attract and retain businesses. Mr. Allen also incurred substantial debt service costs with bonds for extensive prison construction. He turned to cuts for the Virginia Department of Transportation, leaving it underfunded and poorly managed, papering over cost overruns and running up debt service to a level that by 2006 may reach 9 percent of the transportation budget.

Mr. Gilmore rode into office on a pledge to repeal the car tax, which proved to be an immensely popular and devastatingly expensive idea. Growth would cover the cost, he said; but by the time he left office, Mr. Gilmore had mortgaged Virginia's long-term future to finance short-term gains. At that point, in January 2002, the state had roughly $1.5 billion less than it needed to cover costs for the six months left in the fiscal year; and for the biennium to follow, the state was looking at forecasts showing it to be about $2.3 billion shy of what it would need merely to maintain current services. Mr. Gilmore's insistence on cutting the car tax in the face of a recession that was obviously underway was responsible for much of the shortfall. He also borrowed heavily against future revenue and relied on accounting gimmicks to cover transportation and other programs.

Such was the bad hand dealt to Mr. Warner, not to mention to local government leaders who had to make up for lost state aid once Mr. Gilmore's car tax plan began devouring the state budget. For counties, that has meant higher property taxes. For the first budget rounds, Mr. Warner took to cutting and pasting and exhausting any remaining accounting gimmicks. All along, the need to overhaul Virginia's antiquated and unfair tax code was as obvious as it should have been to Mr. Warner's two predecessors. Now, the governor has taken the lead, with a formula that most Virginians may find even lightens their tax burdens while generating money for education and other essential services.

The tax and budget proposals are sure to generate debate in the General Assembly. But the governors who deepened the financial hole are hardly the best counselors to sit in the critics' corner.

A trend my cohort has long noticed

For More People in 20's and 30's, Home Is Where the Parents Are
By TAMAR LEWIN

n the job, James Navarro seems to be a model of mature adulthood. At 30, he is an appellate court lawyer in Brooklyn, working 50 hours a week on research to help judges decide cases.

But look at the rest of his life, and the picture becomes murkier.

Mr. Navarro lives with his parents in Queens. His mother packs lunch for him a few times a week. His bedroom still has his high school baseball trophies and a giant stuffed bunny that was a present from a former girlfriend. On weekends, he plays touch football and goes drinking and clubbing with his two best friends — both about his age, fully employed and living with their parents, too.

"When I was in college, I thought I'd be married by 24 and have a house and kids by 30," Mr. Navarro said. "Now I think the idea of being an emotionally developed male by 24 is ridiculous. I want to get married and have kids someday. But I don't feel any pressure that it has to be soon."

Mr. Navarro is no loser: he is funny, good-looking, charming - and typical of his generation's slowed-down approach to adulthood. To some extent, the data tells the story. Nearly all the traditional markers of adulthood, including marrying, getting a college degree and moving out of the family home, are occurring later than they did a generation ago.

The shape of life for those between 18 and 34 has changed so profoundly that many social scientists now think of those years as a new life stage, "transitional adulthood" - just as, a century ago, they recognized adolescence as a life stage separating childhood from adulthood.

"There used to be a societal expectation that people in their early 20's would have finished their schooling, set up a household, gotten married and started their careers," said Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "But now that's the exception rather than the norm. Ask most people in their 20's whether they're adults and you get a nervous laugh. They're not sure."

Sociologists say there are several indicators of this state of mind. Nationwide, the median age of first marriage, which hovered around 21 for women and 23 for men from the 1940's to the 1970's, has risen steadily since to 25 for women and 27 for men.

Education takes longer. Only about a third of those who go straight from high school to four-year residential colleges graduate four years later. With so many young people taking time out to make money or change direction, most education experts now use six-year graduation rates as their benchmarks.

Perhaps the most striking change, though, has been in the proportion of young adults nationwide who live with their parents. To be sure, the numbers remain small - about 14 percent. Nonetheless, between 1970 and 2000, the most recent census, the percentage of 24- to 34-year-olds living with parents or grandparents increased by 50 percent. During the boom years of the 90's, the trend reversed slightly among those in their 20's but held steady among those in their 30's.

The Census Bureau's Current Population Survey shows that the numbers are on the rise again. The trend is most visible in New York - 30 percent of the New York-Northeastern New Jersey area's 22- to 31-year-olds live with their parents - followed by Los Angeles and other large, expensive cities.

The changes raise many policy concerns, chief among them that most American institutions are still built around the idea that people in their 20's are fully autonomous. Young adults coming out of the foster care system, or the juvenile justice system, get no continuing support. Health insurance cuts off, even for 20-somethings in affluent families.

Then, too, the longer transition to adulthood has striking implications for parenthood.

"Parenting used to be thought of as a life stage of about 18 years," said Robert Schoeni, a professor at the University of Michigan who works at its Institute for Social Research. "If it means continuing support for 30 or even 34 years, that's not always comfortable for parents who were raised under very different conditions and were expected to be on their own much earlier."

In part, Professor Furstenberg and others say, the longer transition to adulthood reflects an economy in which most jobs that pay enough to support middle-class life require years of advanced education. For most young people, that means years of semiautonomy, in which they piece together loans, part-time jobs and whatever money their families can provide. Many spend their 20's and early 30's shuttling between college and work, professional school and travel, community service and internships, never earning enough to settle down, marry and raise a child.

Nancy Dye, president of Oberlin College, said that whereas most graduates used to go straight on to graduate school, having chosen at least a preliminary career path, many now stick around, uncertain of their direction. A few years ago, she said, "students came up with a new term, F.T.L. - failure to launch."

In interviews with dozens of 20-somethings, most say they share a sense that there is no right time to have completed their education, lived on their own or gotten married, that such fixed expectations have no place in their lives. And many see it as beneficial to step slowly and gradually into adult life.

"I think it's great, and really important, to take time to date and travel and hang out with your friends," said Elisabeth Levy, 28, a catering sales manager at a private club in Midtown Manhattan. "This way, when you do finally settle down, you're really ready, and you don't wake up at 33, married with two kids and a house, and trapped, like `How did this happen?' and `What did I do with my life?' "

Those living at home, even if employed in good jobs, often describe their arrangements as sensible and mature, in that instead of throwing away money on rent, they are saving money toward their future. And if, meanwhile, they are back in their childhood bedrooms, working at low-paying jobs to save enough to continue their educations or buy homes, they say, that is no tragedy.

For many, the 20's are a floating, flexible, exploratory time.

"For the last few years, my life has been so up in the air," said Jennie Schneier, 24, who works part time in public radio. "Several of my friends have started applying to grad schools. One is applying to three different types of grad school - law, business and photography - to see where she'll get in.

"I find grad school appealing, too, because I like the idea of settling into something. But I don't have any idea what to study."

Ms. Schneier, who has lived with her parents for three years, recently moved from an unpaid internship to a job where she is paid one day a week. "Sometimes I think it's ridiculous that I'm about to turn 25 and can't support myself," she said. "I've regressed a little since I've been back with my parents: If I'm home by 6:30, there's dinner on the table. And my dad does the laundry."

The Research Network on Adult Transitions, a team of social scientists directed by Professor Furstenberg and financed by the MacArthur Foundation, has for years been gathering data on 18- to 34-year-olds: when they reach the traditional markers (later, throughout the Western world), what they think constitutes adulthood (self-sufficiency, a full-time job and an independent household, but not necessarily marriage or children), when they feel most adult (at work), how much support they get from their parents (on average, $38,000, or $2,200 a year from 18 to 34).

The return to the nest of children in their 20's and 30's can be a jolt for parents. Several parents with newly returned children, who would not be quoted by name for fear of hurting their children's feelings, agreed that despite the pleasures of having their offspring close at hand, their return had been stressful and, in some cases, disruptive of their plans to sell a large home, retire or move.

Suddenly, they say, everything is up for grabs: Who will be home for dinner? Who will cook dinner? If a parent is wakened at 2 a.m. by the smell of cooking, and rises in the morning to find no milk for breakfast, dirty dishes in the sink and a house full of sleeping 20-somethings, what is the right response?

Many parents face not one departure and one return, but a revolving door, as one after another of their offspring leaves for college, returns, leaves for graduate school, returns, moves for a job and returns again.

At the Navarro household, in Maspeth, Queens, all four grown children are back home: James; his two brothers, 27 and 25; and their sister, 23.

"Michael, the 27-year-old, talks about moving out, but he never does it," James Navarro said. "It doesn't make me feel too much like a kid to live there. As I've gotten older, I appreciate my parents more."

Still, it is not the life Mr. Navarro envisioned. In high school, he was a star athlete, good enough, he thought, for a professional baseball career. To that end, he chose St. Thomas University in Miami. But his baseball dreams did not pan out, so after graduating he returned home and spent two years working as a security officer in Midtown Manhattan.

"I knew I wouldn't be doing that too long, but I didn't know what I would do," he said, describing a state of mind that seems to descend on many of his generation as they leave college. "I thought about teaching, social work, working for a nonprofit, but law school seemed the most challenging."

Most of Mr. Navarro's closest friends remain unmarried, he said, and not quite ready, at least financially, to set up households.

"I've only been to one wedding in the last three years, and that was because a girl I know wanted me to go as her date," he said.

But one of his best friends is in a relationship that has become increasingly serious. And hanging over their lunchtime banter is the first tinge of awareness that they may be getting a bit old for the lives they lead.

"On New Year's Eve, sometimes, we have these motivational talks," Mr. Navarro said. "We'll say, we're getting older, we can't go to these places with teeny-boppers anymore."

They laugh and begin talking about the weekend football team. They are asked about the age range of the other players.

Mr. Navarro gets a look of mock alarm: "Who's the oldest? Oh, no, is it me?"

The health care cost issue will not go away

Illinois to Seek Exemption to Buy Drugs From Canada
By MONICA DAVEY

HICAGO, Dec. 21 — Rod R. Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, will ask the federal authorities to permit the state to ignore federal law and buy prescription drugs from Canada, aides said Sunday.

The request, which was met with skepticism by a federal official, is the latest political maneuver in a swell of pressure from local and state leaders to cut costs by buying drugs outside the country's borders.

Mr. Blagojevich, who planned to send the request on Monday to Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, wants Illinois to be designated for the nation's first "federally approved drug importation pilot program."

While government officials elsewhere, including in New Hampshire, have announced that they will simply forge ahead and assist people in buying drugs from Canada, Mr. Blagojevich says he will not break the law. Instead, under his proposal, the federal authorities would waive the law and allow Illinois to save what the governor estimates could be up to $90.7 million a year by buying Canadian medicine for state employees and retirees.

In recent months, governors and mayors have increased pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to allow state and municipal governments to do what some older Americans have been doing on their own for years: filling prescriptions in Canada, where regulations make prices 30 to 50 percent lower.

Job opportunities for emigrants

Offshore Jobs in Technology: Opportunity or a Threat?
By STEVE LOHR

The United States economy is finally getting stronger, but there seems to be one unsettling weakness: the apparent wholesale flight of technology jobs like computer programming and technical support to lower-cost nations, led by India.

The trend is typically described in ungainly terms - as "offshore outsourcing" or "offshoring." But that rhetorical hurdle has done nothing to lessen the recent public debate and expressions of angst over this kind of job migration. There are some early signs of political reaction. Last month, for example, the State of Indiana pulled out of a $15 million contract with an Indian company to provide technology services. And a proposed bill in New Jersey would restrict the use of offshore workers by companies doing work for the state.

Forrester Research, a technology consulting firm, published a report this month pointing out that the movement abroad is only gradual. The firm bemoaned "the rising tide of offshore hype." Yet Forrester itself played a significant role in framing the debate on offshore outsourcing, as well as stirring fears, with a report last year. That report, published in November 2002, predicted that 3.3 million services jobs in America would move offshore by 2015, and added that the information technology industry will "lead the initial overseas exodus."

So what is really happening? Is the offshore outsourcing of technology jobs a cataclysmic jolt or a natural evolution of the economy?

The short answer is that the trend is real, irreversible and another step in the globalization of the American economy. It does present a challenge to industry, government and individual workers. But the shifting of some technology jobs abroad fits into a well-worn historical pattern of economic change and adjustment in the United States.

Time's up

Across US, jobless losing benefits
Proposals that would extend aid spark debate

By Susan Milligan, Globe Staff, 12/21/2003

WASHINGTON -- More than 90,000 people who have been out of work for months will lose their federal benefits today, when a program to aid the long-term unemployed expires.

During the first six months of next year, more than 2 million unemployed people across the country will be cut off from the extra assistance, unless Congress acts. In Massachusetts, 2,500 workers a week will lose their benefits, according to government statistics studied by a congressional committee and several economic analysis groups.

"It's a really diverse group of people who are running out of benefits -- higher-income, dot-commers, lower-wage workers, and manufacturing employees. It's people from every industry, from all states," said Maurice Emsellem, public policy director for the National Employment Law Project. "Whatever's going on with the economy, it's not translating into significant job growth."

In January, nearly 400,000 workers, including 12,201 in Massachusetts, are expected to exhaust their state benefits, according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. More than 2.1 million people nationwide -- including 61,751 in the Bay State -- will see their state unemployment benefits end in the first six months of next year.

You should have let Hillary handle it

The cost of health care begins to afflict voters
By Raja Mishra, Globe Staff, 12/21/2003

For Glenn Crenshaw, $21 makes a difference.

That's how much the monthly medical bills for his 12-year-old son, Ryan, have increased this year. Even though Crenshaw, 42, has insurance for himself and his children, the slight bump in this one premium, on top of a series of health cost increases over the past five years, has quite literally caused him pain.

"I went without my arthritis medications for six months so I could pay for Ryan's pills," he said. "I was hurting all the time."

And though his older son plans to join the Marines this summer, health care costs, rather than terrorism or war, will be on his mind as he heads to the polls this election season.

"Health care will decide my vote," he said.

Crenshaw is far from alone. A poll for The Boston Globe, released this month, indicated that health care is the top issue for likely New Hampshire Democratic primary voters.

In a separate Kaiser Family Foundation survey, also released this month, 35 percent of respondents nationwide said rising cost was the year's key health issue, over health care for seniors, the uninsured, and HMO regulation.

But while the Democratic presidential hopefuls have outlined various health-care proposals, specialists say that none has offered a plan that would effectively address the issue.

Their health-care platforms generally focus on insuring some of the 42 million Americans without coverage. This would help reduce some costs, given that hospitals and governments pass on to the insured the cost of caring for uninsured patients who show up in emergency rooms.

But specialists say covering more of the uninsured will not stem, in any significant way, rising health-care costs for others. Health care is more expensive because it has gotten better, and although Americans gripe about costs, they are also unwilling to forfeit the high-tech improvements that drive costs upward. That is why none of the major candidates is pushing for serious price controls or sweeping change of the sort required to tamp down costs, specialists say.

"While Americans don't like to pay a lot more, and they worry about rising costs, they are not amenable to things that restrict their access to care," said Diane Rowland, vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group specializing in health-care research. "That's the dilemma of anyone trying to work on this issue." President Clinton was the last high-level Democrat to have pushed a plan that might have broadly reduced costs by moving many Americans into managed-care plans and by placing tight controls on many parts of the health-care system. That proposal went down in flames, and was among the reasons for a GOP landslide in the 1994 congressional elections.

The fact is that more money is buying better care. Computer scanners can give doctors detailed snapshots inside patients' bodies. Dozens of screening tests catch diseases early or detect problems that physicians once overlooked. An ever-growing arsenal of prescription drugs keeps a wide variety of maladies in check.

And it all costs money. For instance, from 1992 to 2001, Americans' prescription purchases increased 68 percent, from 7.3 to 11.1 prescriptions per person, according to a Kaiser study. In short, more people are taking more drugs. In that time, more than 1,000 new drugs were approved by the federal government.

"The technology is prolific," Rowland said.

In the 1990s, the health care industry pursued a way to try to control costs: managed care. But when Americans' care was managed, they reacted testily. Democrats led the charge as Congress threatened HMO regulation. In response, most managed care plans have loosened their controls over health spending. And costs have continued to spiral upward.

In Massachusetts over the past year, health insurance premiums rose 13.9 percent, the third consecutive annual double-digit increase, according to state data. In the same period, nonsupervisory wages went up only 3.1 percent.

Most people are covered through employers. But with costs rising, companies have taken more in wages to pay for the increasing prices. In Massachusetts over the past year, the average employee's monthly contribution for health coverage increased 61 percent, from $57 per month to $92, according to state data.

Health care is clearly eating away at wages. Many small businesses, unable to keep up with premiums, have stopped covering employees. Others who bought insurance on their own were priced out of the market.

Certainly, Glenn Crenshaw has felt these pressures.

The single father of four lives on "modest" disability pay, he said. His son Ryan has a congenital heart defect that can require more than $100 in prescription drug payments per month.

This year, the state government, which insures his son, raised his monthly premium to $52 from $31, citing budget pressures. Indeed, medical costs are the largest category of state expenditures, and have been steadily growing over the past years.

"I have a mortgage, I have three kids to support," he said. "On a fixed income, even $21 is a subsantial amount."

But Crenshaw benefits from developments in the pharmaceutical industry. Pills manage his son's heart-related problems, as well as his own peptic disease, chronic back pain, high blood pressure, and arthritis.

Indeed, pharmaceuticals have accounted for a substantial chunk of the cost increases. Drug spending in the United States has increased by 10 percent or more every year since 1995, according to the Center for Studying Health System Change.

Some assert that pharmaceutical companies are inflating prices to pay for their aggressive marketing practices. But it's widely agreed that drug development has afforded better care, from treating HIV to ulcers to high cholesterol.

But rising drug costs are not alone. In the first six months of this year, hospital inpatient bills in the United States rose 7.6 percent, hospital outpatient costs went up 12.9 percent, and prices for doctors' office visits jumped by 6.1 percent.

But there might be some relief ahead. Health care spending per American increased by 9.6 percent in 2002, down from 10 percent in 2001. It was the first time in five years that the cost increases slowed down, if only a little.

Raja Mishra can be reached at [email protected].

Scripted?

With salty remark, Clark defends record

By Associated Press, 12/21/2003

DERRY, N.H. -- Moments after praising his opponents in the Democratic presidential race as worthy running mates, Wesley Clark said, in no uncertain terms, how he would respond if they or anyone else criticized his patriotism or military record.

"I'll beat the . . . out of them," Clark told a questioner as he walked through the crowd after a town hall meeting yesterday. "I hope that's not on television," he added.

It was, live, on C-Span.

Clark was responding to a rambling question by a man who referred to then-candidate George W. Bush attacking Senator John McCain's commitment to veterans in the 2000 primaries. The man asked Clark if he would take the offensive if Bush or any of the other Democrats questioned his trading military caps with a Bosnian general who now is a war crimes suspect, or cited critical comments about Clark by former Army brass.

His campaign was quick to say Clark was speaking rhetorically, and would come out strongly against anyone who challenges his patriotism or military service.

"General Clark is a military man and a fighter," said the campaign's national spokesman, Bill Buck. "He'll stand up to President Bush or any of the administration's chicken hawks that attack his patriotism, military record, or his commitment to veterans, which is one of the reasons why he will beat George Bush."

Buck balked at commenting on whether Clark was including "the other Democrats" in his response, and refused to comment when asked if Clark regretted making the remark.

The campaign's traveling press secretary, Jamal Simmons, was with Clark at the time, and said he heard Clark's answer but not the question. He called it "an unscripted comment from a blunt-spoken leader."

"If anyone tries to question Wes Clark's character, integrity, or his commitment to this country or its security, they're going to be in the biggest fight they've ever had," he said.

They're getting closer

It's important that the history of Black people in America be taught this way: interwoven in the history of the nation, exactly as it happened.
Black History Curriculum Developed for Statewide Use

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 21, 2003; Page C04

Public school students in Maryland will study African American history and culture as part of their regular curriculum starting next year, with topics including slavery, the civil rights movement and Dixieland jazz.

The program was developed with the help of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open late next year in downtown Baltimore. task force that included museum staff members and state education officials spent the past three years creating roughly 80 lessons.

The lessons mirror the museum's three major themes: labor, arts and enlightenment, and family and community. They focus not only on prominent names -- Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. -- but on less famous figures who played important roles in shaping black history in Maryland and across the country. They include the builders of the "skip-jacks" that sailed in and out of Baltimore's harbor during colonial times. And the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay who helped establish the state's seafood industry. And artists such as Jacob Lawrence and William Johnson, who painted scenes of farm and city life during the Harlem Renaissance.

"We have delved deeply into our past," said Charles Christian, the task force chairman and a professor at the University of Maryland. "We've gone beyond show and tell."

State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick said the partnership is the first of its kind in the country. The curriculum will be field-tested next school year and is scheduled to be taught in grades 4 through 8 by 2005, officials said. High school lessons are in the works.

The curriculum will not shy away from the harsher aspects of black history, Christian said. An eighth-grade lesson, for example, asks students to describe the origin of the Ku Klux Klan and its impact after the Civil War. Students also will study Maryland laws that established poll taxes and literacy tests to keep black residents from voting.

"It's an attempt to tell a full story of American history, warts and all," said A.T. Stephens, a member of the task force and education director for the museum.

The movement to include black history in U.S. schools began in the 1970s, said Alvin Thornton, associate dean at Howard University and a former member of the Prince George's County school board. Until then, textbooks often portrayed African Americans primarily as slaves, while issues such as the Jim Crow laws were covered in only a few pages, Thornton said. "If you read the history text and looked at the curriculum guides, especially if you were an African American, you were absent," he said. "It's almost like you didn't exist."

The movement reached its peak during the early 1990s. By that time, the development of "Afrocentric" curricula in public schools in the District, Prince George's and elsewhere sparked widespread debate. Some parents and educators criticized the programs for presenting what they said was inaccurate data [P6: It couldn't be accurate as long as it was taught as though Black people's experiences and views were somehow tangential to the rest of the nation]. Others worried that the focus on black history overshadowed contributions by other racial and ethnic groups [P6: Frankly, Black American's contributed half or more of what is distinctly American in our culture, so I'd say it did overshadow the contributions of others].

Currently, Maryland students learn about important black figures in school, but Stephens said most of the lessons hit only the historical highlights. The new curriculum is more comprehensive and could be woven into English, social studies, art and music classes, he said.

Students also will take related field trips to the Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, and staff members from the museum will visit schools to lead workshops and train teachers.

Grasmick said the material could eventually appear on the Maryland School Assessment, the state's mandatory standardized tests. "This will be an integral part of our content standards," she said. "If it's an add-on, then it will be ignored."

Development of the curriculum was paid for by the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Foundation, a private charitable organization. Museum officials have pledged $5 million toward implementing the program and hope to raise an additional $15 million.

Grasmick said she hopes the lessons will help to narrow the achievement gap between black and white students. States have been grappling with ways to boost test scores of poor and minority students for years, but the federal No Child Left Behind Act passed last year has given the effort new urgency. The law requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

On Maryland state exams given in the spring, 43 percent of black students passed the reading test and just more than 75 percent of white students passed. In math, about 30 percent of black students scored proficient, and nearly 65 percent of white students did.

"One of the things we deal with is sort of an attitude that it isn't fashionable -- the kids would say 'cool' -- to be engaged in success academically," Grasmick said. "We want this [curriculum] . . . to so capture the interest of our African American students."

Critics of multicultural education have questioned the link between a more inclusive curriculum and student achievement. They also have said that such programs highlight differences rather than similarities among students. But school and museum officials said that providing black students with historical role models is a necessary ingredient in helping them to improve their test scores, especially if they live in areas of high crime or come from broken families.

George L. Russell Jr., chairman of the museum's board of directors, said, "If we can teach these kids their past, the young black kid from the community [can] see that poverty is not a bar to success."

No rationale? How about, "Because they were bogus?"

3 Counts Against Translator Are Dropped
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — The Air Force has dropped three counts in an espionage case against a Syrian-born airman who worked as a translator at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The lawyer for Senior Airman Ahmad I. al-Halabi, Donald G. Rehkopf Jr., said on Saturday that once those charges were removed, "simply the gut of the case was gone."

A single count in the charge that accused the airman of "aiding the enemy," a capital offense, was dropped. Also dropped were counts that dealt with e-mailing information about detainees and committing espionage by transmitting information to unauthorized recipients. Airman al-Halabi still faces 17 charges. He was arrested in July.

Lt. Gen. William Welser III, commander of the 18th Air Force at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, convening authority for Airman al-Halabi's general court-martial, gave no rationale for his decision to drop the charges.

The N.R.A. and the Republican Party agree in principle

A Deficit of $100 Million Is Confronting the N.R.A.
By STEPHANIE STROM

ostly legal, legislative and political battles in the last decade have left the National Rifle Association with a $100 million deficit, reopening a bitter debate within the group about how it manages its money.

In the past decade the group's efforts have helped Republicans win the White House and Congress and led to laws in more than 30 states banning lawsuits against gun manufacturers. In the last year the N.R.A. helped pay for a losing legal battle against campaign finance legislation, which the Supreme Court upheld this month.

But through many of those years, according to Internal Revenue Service and N.R.A. records, the organization spent more than it took in.

Even in 2000, when gun owners helped elect George W. Bush as president, pushing N.R.A. membership to a 10-year high, expenses outstripped revenues by $20.4 million, according to I.R.S. filings.

"The victories we have delivered have been costly, cutting deeply into the N.R.A.'s budgets," Wayne R. LaPierre Jr., the group's executive vice president and chief executive, wrote in an N.R.A. magazine, America's 1st Freedom, in October. "Winning takes millions of dollars beyond what individual members' dues cover. Today, if we were faced with a full-blown legislative assault, we simply would not have the war chest."

The N.R.A., one of the largest and most powerful grass-roots groups in the country, relies heavily on membership dues, but since 2000 — when the organization had a surge of new members — membership has slid about 20 percent, from a peak of 4.3 million to about 3.4 million.

That is partly because membership usually rises in election years and ebbs thereafter. N.R.A. officials note that membership is higher than the average during the 1990's.

But falling membership is also a result of complacency among gun owners, gun rights advocates say.

"A lot of people think that because we have a Republican in the White House, our guns are safe and our rights won't come under attack," said Angel Shamaya, founder and executive director of Keep and Bear Arms, a rival organization.

Experts who study nonprofit groups like the N.R.A. disagree about how great an impact the deficit can have on the group's lobbying or political activities. But the growing shortfall, coupled with the recent departure of Charlton Heston, the actor who was the president and the public face of the N.R.A. over the last seven years, has reignited internal fights over financial management.

"We shouldn't be going into the hole, which is what we're doing," said Neal Knox, a member who once tried to unseat Mr. LaPierre partly over concerns about finances. "The deficit isn't there because we're taking in more or less money, it's there because we're spending more money than we have."

Mr. Knox raised the same concern to incite a mutiny in the mid-1990's, which culminated at the 1997 annual meeting, when Mr. LaPierre narrowly retained his job.

N.R.A. officials said that Mr. Knox, once a powerful executive at the group, had other motives. "It's the old battle plan where you create a crisis and then come swooping in with a plan to resolve it," said Wayne Ross, a board member who last year ran for governor in Alaska. "Neal is upset about being on the outside, and so he's going to raise any issue he can."

Mr. Ross said he was not concerned about the N.R.A.'s finances. "I would rather have the N.R.A. get into deficit spending and fight the good fight than just sit on the sidelines because it was financially prudent," he said.

The N.R.A. contends that its deficit is a fiction manufactured by accounting standards. "Trying to do an analysis of the organization based on its accounting-created balance sheet is a futile attempt because it is driven by assets that aren't there, namely the quality of its members, and liabilities that aren't really there either," said Wilson H. Phillips Jr., the N.R.A. treasurer.

He said the deficit was a sign of strength, because the bulk of the liabilities reflect future obligations to long-term members. "What appears to be a growth in the deficit is actually a demonstration of membership growth and growth in longer-term commitments from members," Mr. Phillips said.

Cat-skinning technique #114b

Iraq Pipelines and Storage Tanks Set on Fire
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:12 a.m. ET

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents attacked pipelines and an oil storage depot in three parts of Iraq, setting fires that blazed for hours and lost millions of gallons of oil, officials and media reported Sunday, as the country faced a critical fuel shortage.

Rebels firing rocket-propelled grenades hit storage tanks in southern Baghdad on Saturday, creating fires that burned about 2.6 million gallons of gasoline, said Issam Jihad, a spokesman for the Oil Ministry.

Also Saturday, a pipeline exploded in the al-Mashahda area 15 miles north of Baghdad, in what Jihad called ``an act of sabotage.''

``The explosion led to the destruction of (part of) the pipeline and to the leakage of vast quantities of oil products,'' Jihad said.

He said he had no immediate information about another reported attack on oil pipelines in northern Iraq.

Al-Jazeera television reported Sunday that large fires were burning following attacks Saturday on four pipelines in the area between Tikrit and Beji. But an AP stringer reported seeing four fires blazing from pipelines further north, between Beji and Mosul, about 250 miles north of Baghdad.

Al-Jazeera quoted officials as saying those fires were caused by saboteurs.

The Oil Ministry introduced rationing on Thursday to overcome shortages that have created mile-long lines of cars at gas stations and waits up to 12 hours. At the same time the U.S. military began to crack down on black marketeers who sell gas for as much as $1.85 a gallon. The official price equates to 5 U.S. cents a gallon.

Multiple causes have created the shortages, including sabotage and difficulties restoring crude oil supplies from war-damaged and antiquated refineries. In addition an estimated 250,000 newly imported cars, most secondhand, that have entered the country since Saddam Hussein was ousted.

Iraq has the world's second-largest oil reserves, second only to neighboring Saudi Arabia.

On to more serious topics

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