Few Signs of Infiltration by Foreign Fighters in Iraq
By JOEL BRINKLEY

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 18 ? The commanding general of the United States Army division that patrols much of Iraq's western borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia said Tuesday that his men had encountered only a handful of foreign fighters trying to sneak into the country to attack American and allied forces.

"I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces," said the officer, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division.

His view was echoed by Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which controls northern Iraq and parts of its borders with Syria, Turkey and Iran.

During a briefing on Monday for a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, he said that since May, his men had captured perhaps 20 foreign fighters trying to slip into the country from those three countries.

During a period in which border patrols have been intensified and new technology is being used, that number suggests only modest foreign incursions into Iraq, in contrast to estimates by the Bush administration.

In Washington late last month, officials estimated the number of foreign fighters in Iraq at 1,000 to 3,000, and the White House has been suggesting that foreign fighters are continuing to enter the country and are behind many of the attacks, linking the war in Iraq to the global campaign against terror.[P6: emphasis added]

In a news conference on Oct. 28, President Bush said: "We are mindful of the fact that some might want to come into Iraq to attack and to create conditions of fear and chaos. The foreign terrorists are trying to create conditions of fear and retreat because they fear a free and peaceful state in the midst of a part of the world where terror has found recruits."

During a news briefing on Tuesday evening, General Swannack, who took over the region two months ago, said his men had captured 13 foreign guerrillas and killed 7 others. Ten days ago, Col. David A. Teeples, who is part of General Swannack's command, said only a small number of the foreigners were among the 500 to 600 people his forces had captured in attacks on coalition forces.

This is something you need to think about.

Look at the job growth figures for Mexico. Consider the quotes from today's NY Times:

Well. We see how effectively higher productivity has increased the wages of the average American worker. Not to mention their job security.

That's not what they said? Oh.

Okay, since Mexico hasn't benefitted from NAFTA and the American people haven't benefitted from NAFTA, I'd like to know who has. Actually, since it's only rational to assume its proponents benefitted, what I want is a real accounting of the benefits and the distribution thereof.

I think I can figure it out if I ignore the descriptions being offered and consider the results.

The government of the U.S.ofA. has a long standing tradition of suspending basic rights at time of war and, under judicial imperitive, restoring them afterward. Hopefully we're seeing the start of the rights restoration phase.

The Bush administration insists that it can hold American citizens in secret as long as it wants, without access to lawyers, simply by calling them "enemy combatants." A New York federal appeals court heard a challenge to that policy this week by the so-called dirty bomber, Jose Padilla. The administration's position makes a mockery of the Constitution and puts every American's liberty at risk. It is important that the court strike it down, and give Mr. Padilla the rights he has been denied.

Mr. Padilla is an American citizen who was taken into custody in Chicago in May 2002. The government suspects him of being part of a "dirty bomb" plot by Al Qaeda, but it has not charged him. Instead, it has labeled him an enemy combatant and locked him up in a naval brig in South Carolina. He has been held there nearly 18 months, with no indication of when he will be tried or released. He has not been allowed to meet with a lawyer, despite a lower court ruling that he should be.

Of all the post-Sept. 11 denials of civil liberties, the enemy combatant doctrine is among the worst. It gives the president untrammeled authority to lock up Americans merely by asserting that they are part of a terrorist plot. In its argument to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit this week, the government insisted that military-style rules like the enemy combatant doctrine now apply to American citizens, even on American soil, because Al Qaeda has "made the battlefield the United States."

Me first.

"On more than one occasion I read a William Safire op-ed looking for signs of honesty."

I just heard on NBC News that the Massachusetts state Supreme Court has ruled gay marriages must receive the same recognition as hetrosexual marriage. The decision is based on the state's constitution which forbids the creation of second class citizens.

Those distant explosions you hear are the heads of a number of right wingers.

ADDENDUM

1. CNN says the court has sent the issue to the state legislature rather than ordering the issuance of the marriage license(s?) that is(are?) at the root of the case.
2. Watching CNN, it occurs to me that the cure for PTS (Political Tourette Syndrome) is to modify O'Reilly's technique and mute the microphone of the person who's turn itr is to shut up and let the other person talk
3. You folks on the religious right should relax and let folks choose to go to hell if they want. According to your scriptures, there's not enough slots on the other side of The Rapture for everyone anyway

One of the reasons for GOPAC's success was that it flew under everyone's political radar. Back in the good old days when rational discource trumped marketing techniques, the weak rationales trumpeted by GOPAC grads could have been easily banished in the agora. Now that they've taken root, you have to come up with something that makes the True Believers in Conservative Rhetoric feel better about themselves than their current beliefs.

By Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 11/18/2003

WASHINGTON -- If you can't beat 'em, copy 'em.

With hopes of liberals winning back Congress someday, a new liberal political action committee has been studying the war plans of legendary conservative field marshal Newt Gingrich. PROPAC, as the group is called, aims to pour $2.6 million over the next year into recruiting and training left-leaning candidates at the grass-roots level -- the first step in a long-range project to fill the pipeline with a fresh supply of future winners.

Poor lack counsel: lawyers cite low pay
(By Thanassis Cambanis, Globe Staff)

Eight-month-old Dwayne F. was swept into a pre-adoptive foster home after his mother suffered an epileptic seizure in court. It was not because she was ruled unfit, but because there was no lawyer willing to take her case for $39 an hour.

Leave No Teacher Behind

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A25

So I have come up with my Leave No Teacher Behind Act. In its roughest form, it means forgiving all teachers their federal income tax. For a married teacher with two kids under the age of 14, that would mean an additional $4,300 a year in disposable income. If states and localities joined in, the pot would be even richer.

Would this by itself mean that we'd find only great teachers in the classroom? Of course not. Salaries would still not be great, and working conditions would not change at all. Schools might be dirty, dangerous places and parents inattentive, abusive and -- in too many cases -- not in the least supportive of their children. Still, it would be a start.

No magic bullet exists for what ails our schools. The problem is complex, and it is further complicated by politics, ideology and in some cases the recalcitrance of teacher unions. Yet everything we know about education alerts us to the critical importance of good teachers and principals. Ask someone who turned his life around and he will often name a teacher.

You may ask, why stop at teachers? Why not social workers, who are also severely underpaid and do work few people would even consider? Fine. It would be okay with me if they didn't have to pay taxes either. But we have to start somewhere, and the field of education is as good a place as any. I would, in short, treat education as Congress does some other American industries.

Glenn at Hi. I'm Black!:

Go, dawg. Go.

This is the attitude to have. "I am already what I've chosen to be. I'm just working out the details at this point."

Because you ARE what's you've chosen to be. Not what you SAY you are, but what your actions show you've chosen.

I believe I saw this in my pre-blogging days. It will come as no surprise to those who see mind as a emergent function of brain activity.

via Baldilocks, who asks:

A legitimate question. It's possible for near identical world-level behavior to have different emotional roots in different people, so it's possible that minorities who hate mainstream folks to have different brain activity patterns than mainstream folks who hate mnorities. But I wouldn't really expect it.

A LITTLE LATER: George at Negrophile links to two mare articles that drop science on the topic. Reading all three articles was enough to surface an unpleasant recognition: that people who attempt to restraing racial impulses may be the ones most affected by this.

I guess Tech is the appropriate category, though Random Rant was a contender.

Blogrolling.com was hacked. I wouldn't have noticed right away, but SPN at http://Soulphoto.net hipped me to it.

Unfortunately, I had been too lazy to move my Blogrolling.com links to a template module like the other guys. And there was a whole bag of them, so it's going to take a while to reconstruct. If you have an RSS feed or a link I can pick up via the TTLB Ecosystem or Technorati I'll definitely find you.

I was strongly considering setting up a links blog and using that to handle my blogroll. This may accelerate that, though I have to weigh it against the other half completed projects I have going.

At any rate, it'll be a couple of days before I deal with this properly…by which I mean setting up a "disaster recovery" procedure for P6.

UPDATE: The list is back. However, you'll note (or not...) the statement about finding another blogrollong method remains.

Black dropout rate stirs anxiety
By Gayle Worland
Tribune staff reporter

November 17, 2003

With the wisdom he has collected over his 17 years, Zaceri Anderson knows that parents are the steppingstones to a child's education.

But in Anderson's case, with his mother ill and his father living out of state, it's his uncle who is helping him get through his junior year of high school.

"I'm just lucky that God sent him to me," Anderson said of Louis Benson, 63, an inventory inspector who is determined to see his nephew through South Shore Career Academy and on to college. "Without him, I would've given up."

Anderson is determined to escape a dismal statistic about his generation: In 2001-02 more than a fourth of African-American male students dropped out of Chicago's public high schools, according to an analysis of state data released last week.

The troubling numbers are what brought Anderson and his uncle--one in a sweat shirt and jeans, the other in a neat suit--together with 100 others Saturday in a South Side church to discuss how parents, schools and entire communities are failing their sons.

"For the magnitude of the problem that is facing the black community, there's almost no response to this from the black community," said Phillip Jackson, 53, executive director of the Black Star Project and the meeting's organizer. "We have a strong reason to be emotional about this because our children are being destroyed."

60 Years On, Again Battling an Abomination of PowerFred Korematsu opposed Japanese internment in the '40s. Now he's urging the Supreme Court not to make the same mistakes with today's detainees.
By Jonathan Turley

November 17, 2003

Largely unnoticed in the hustle and bustle of politics, a quiet and frail 82-year-old man made a symbolic return to Washington, D.C., this month.

His name is Fred Korematsu, and his name graces one of the most infamous decisions ever rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court, the 1944 case of Korematsu vs. United States. With that decision, Korematsu was sent to internment camps to join 120,000 other Japanese Americans who were imprisoned solely because of their ethnicity.

Recently, Korematsu filed a brief before that same court on behalf of hundreds of Muslims being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. For Korematsu and thousands of camp survivors, one of the darkest and most painful chapters of American history is repeating itself.

The Korematsu case has been largely taught in law schools as an abomination, a case in which the Supreme Court yielded to fear and pressure in sending tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children into camps.

Then came 9/11.

Soon, the Bush administration was relying on the arguments from the Korematsu case to assert the same authority exercised by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to put individuals into detention without trial or access to the courts.

The administration has further argued that the president may do with the Guantanamo detainees as he wishes, including executing them under his own set of rules and standards.

By locating the camp in Cuba, the president holds that his actions are no longer controlled by constitutional law. Despite the fact that Guantanamo Bay is a sealed, highly armed U.S. military base, the court has previously held that it is legally "foreign" territory under the control of Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Of course, unlike World War II, there is no declared war against a nation-state. Rather, the president has declared war on terrorism, which is a category of crime. Under this interpretation, any president could declare such a war and claim wartime authority to indefinitely detain people and even execute them without access to the courts.

Korematsu has heard much of this before ? 60 years ago.

http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/031117/0035000033_1.html

Dow Jones Business News
Microsoft Plans to Sell Music Over Web
Monday November 17, 12:35 am ET

In a move likely to send waves through the growing online music market,
Microsoft Corp. (NasdaqNM:MSFT - News) plans to introduce a
song-downloading service next year that will compete with similar
offerings from Apple Computer Inc. (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) , Roxio Inc.
(NasdaqNM:ROXI - News)'s Napster and others, Monday's Wall Street Journal
reported.

A spokeswoman for the Redmond, Wash., software company confirmed that
Microsoft's MSN Web site will offer such a service in 2004, but declined
to provide further details. Microsoft executives previously have said the
company was considering selling music online; the company's latest
comments represent the most concrete statement yet of its intentions. A
person familiar with the matter says Microsoft has been in regular contact
with major music companies to discuss plans for a service.

Limbaugh Is Back on the Air, With Fans and Foes All Ears
By JACQUES STEINBERG

More than five weeks after he entered a residential treatment center for what he described as an addiction to prescription pain medication, Rush Limbaugh is to return to the airwaves today.

While his voice will be beamed into an atmosphere swirling with questions ? not the least of which center on whether he acquired some of those drugs illegally ? one point seems assured: Mr. Limbaugh, by far the biggest star in talk radio, is poised to draw one of the biggest audiences in his 15-year career in syndication.

Of those tuning into the program, which will be broadcast live on the East Coast beginning at noon, the most vocal are likely to be split into two camps. Some will be loyalists, many of them conservatives, who have expressed a willingness in recent weeks to forgive Mr. Limbaugh his transgressions.

Others, however, may be less familiar with his show ? many of them the "feminazis" and other liberals Mr. Limbaugh says he loves to hate ? who wonder how he might reconcile his own behavior with his past statements recommending jail time for drug users.

"I would expect that Limbaugh's listenership will be three to four times its normal size when he comes on the air," said Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, a trade journal, which estimates Mr. Limbaugh's weekly audience at more than 14.5 million. "Personally, he might be in the worst trench he's ever been in. But people are curious to hear what Rush's going to say, which puts him, professionally, at the peak of his career."

In One Oregon City, Jobless Residents Ask, 'What Recovery?'
By SARAH KERSHAW

Published: November 17, 2003

ALBANY, Ore., Nov. 14 ? Gloria Hunt has heard the news, all about the nation's apparent economic recovery, about the thousands of new jobs, the upturn, the rosier outlook. Those upbeat bulletins, though, sound to Ms. Hunt like the good fortune of a distant cousin who struck it rich while the rest of the family was still dirt poor.

Economic growth has not made its way to this western Oregon city or to Ms. Hunt, 54, who has been laid off three times from three separate troubled industries ? food processing, sheet metal production and a credit card company ? since she moved here 14 years ago. Since her latest layoff, from a credit card company that filed for bankruptcy in March, Ms. Hunt has been looking for work for almost eight months.

"I've read the articles," said Ms. Hunt, who frequently attends the so-called networking sessions held twice a week at the local employment help center, which last Monday drew a record 34 jobless people. "But I haven't seen a whole lot of it here. It may be filtering down, but it's not visible at this point."

Ms. Hunt is one of thousands of jobless people in Linn County, where the unemployment rate has hovered between 8 and 10 percent for the last three years. Even as the Bush administration trumpets the national economic growth spurt of the last two months, the jobless rate here, across Oregon, in the rest of the Pacific Northwest and in several other regions has remained high, with economists saying recovery is months or even years away.

Improved Economy Doesn't Lead to Popping of Corks in Atlanta
By DAVID LEONHARDT

ATLANTA, Nov. 14 ? This city, which boomed even more than the rest of the country in the 1990's and busted even harder when the century turned, may well be the epicenter of the economy's emerging recovery.

Every day, nearly around the clock at the airport here, dozens of workers in hulking trucks are moving enough dirt to build a two-mile-long, 70-foot-high hill for a new runway. Hotels are fuller than they were a year ago, state tax revenues are rising again and the Atlanta area added more than twice as many jobs to its economy during the 12 months that ended in September as any other metropolitan area, the Labor Department says.

For all of the encouraging signs, however, the economic mood here has remained decidedly measured. If anything, it seems far more similar to the anxiety of the last couple of years than the breathless optimism that filled the 90's, many workers, business executives and economists say.

"If you look back over the last couple years, this is the first time we've made it to October or November without seeing the economy turn down again," said James H. Reese, president of Randstad North America, which runs 28 temporary-help offices in the area. "But we're not ready to scream victory or wave the flag by any stretch of the imagination."

In this way, the city seems typical of much of the country, where economic growth is finally fast enough to create jobs but many people worry that the good news will be fleeting.

There are reasons for the caution. Many of the new jobs here are only temporary, and even many of the permanent ones pay less than those in the shrunken manufacturing and technology sectors did.

Personal income growth continues to trail inflation in Atlanta, according to Economy.com, a research company that follows regional trends. The bankruptcy rate has remained almost 35 percent higher this year than it was in 2000.

Maria Del Conte says she is thrilled with her temporary job as an administrative assistant at an engineering company north of the city, having lost two other jobs in the last two years. But Ms. Del Conte is still making about 25 percent less than she did before 2001, when she worked as a meeting planner for pharmaceutical companies.

"Because of the economy, there is no chance of becoming a permanent employee" in her new job, said Ms. Del Conte, who lives in Kennesaw, an Atlanta suburb, with her teenage daughter.

More Consumers Reach Out to Touch the Screen
By AMY HARMON

INDIANAPOLIS ? Striding into the airport here one recent afternoon, Kimberly Ward did not so much as glance at the two ticket agents waiting at the counter. Like most of her fellow travelers, she instead claimed an automated check-in terminal, touched its screen a few times, and took the proferred boarding pass with a quick smile of thanks.

Ms. Ward, 37, pays for gas only at the pump. She shops at Marsh, a supermarket in her neighborhood that has machines that let customers scan, bag and pay for groceries themselves. Her favorite bank teller is her A.T.M.

Dealing with humans in such situations "just slows you down," she says. "This is a lot more convenient."

A new generation of self-service machines is slipping into the daily lives of many Americans. Rejected for decades as too complicated, the machines are being embraced by a public whose faith in technology has grown as its satisfaction with more traditional forms of customer service has diminished. Faced with the alternative ? live people ? it seems that many consumers now prefer the machines.

"The main thing is you don't want to deal with the cashiers and their attitudes," said Dexter Thomas, 37, bagging his own pizza rolls and Eggos in a self-checkout lane at Pathmark store in downtown Brooklyn this month. "That's why people come to this line."

Soon they may have little choice. Eager to save money on labor costs, businesses are stepping up the pace of automation. Nearly 13,000 self- checkout systems will have been installed in American retail stores like Kroger and Home Depot by the end of this year, more than double the number in 2001, according to the market research firm IDC. Delta Air Lines spent millions of dollars this year to line 81 airports with chest-high automated kiosks: 22 million of its passengers ? 40 percent of the total ? checked in by touch-screen this year, up from 350,000 in 2001.

Jury still out on e-voting
Touted as an antidote to the hanging chad, e-voting solution not proven, experts say
BY MICHAEL HARDY
Nov. 10, 2003

Legislation that could add voter-verified paper ballots to controversial touch-screen electronic voting machines remains stalled in a House committee, despite 61 cosponsors.

More and more election authorities are buying the machines, which are made by several companies. They are spurred by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The law provides funding to replace outdated punch card and lever systems in an effort to avoid repeating the Florida chad controversy that kept the 2000 presidential election in limbo for weeks.

…The legislation, called the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, introduced by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) in May, would require that the machines, generically called direct recording electronic (DRE) machines, print out a paper record of each vote so the voter can make sure it is correct. The printed ballot would be stored at the polling place and used if a manual recount or an audit of the results is needed.

Although the bill has attracted 61 cosponsors ? all Democrats ? it is still in the House Administration Committee. The bill has yet to attract any Republican support, according to Holt's staff.

…In July, the Johns Hopkins team fanned the flames with the results of their analysis of Diebold AccuVote-TS code, obtained from an unofficial Web site. Maryland officials, who were close to finalizing a $55 million purchase of machines to use statewide, asked Science Applications International Corp. to perform a second analysis.

SAIC officials confirmed that the Hopkins researchers had analyzed the code properly, but said that many of the risks could be avoided or minimized by not connecting the machines to a network and by implementing security protocols and processes for election officials and poll workers.

SAIC's report, dated Sept. 2, echoed Diebold's criticism. "While many of the statements made by Mr. Rubin were technically correct, it is clear that Mr. Rubin did not have a complete understanding of the state of Maryland's implementation of the system and the election process controls or environment, [which] reduce or eliminate many of the vulnerabilities identified in the Rubin report," the SAIC report states.

Ultimately, Maryland officials completed the purchase, accepting 12 of SAIC's 17 recommendations. Diebold officials agreed to make three software changes to increase security but only for machines sold in Maryland.

No Home Runs in Energy Bill
Little Impact Expected for Imported Oil, Pollution, Power Grid

By Dan Morgan and Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 16, 2003; Page A10

The energy bill before Congress is a bulky tome of more than 1,000 pages, with thousands of provisions affecting every corner of the country.

But for all its size, industry officials and environmental activists of widely divergent viewpoints generally agree that it will have only a modest impact on the nation's most pressing energy problems, including its reliance on foreign energy supplies, an overburdened electricity grid and fuels that pollute the air and may alter the atmosphere.

For those who want to deal aggressively with the dangers of climate change and air polluted by auto exhausts, power plants and factories, the bill is a disappointment.

But for those who believe the United States needs to dramatically increase its domestic energy production in the interest of national security, the legislation also falls short.

Negotiators provided a wide range of tax incentives to promote wind power generators, energy-efficient homes and hybrid passenger cars running on gasoline and batteries, and Republicans say these and other conservation measures will produce or save enough electricity between now and 2020 to make it unnecessary to build 130 new 300-megawatt power plants.

Money would be authorized for powering government buildings with state-of-the-art photovoltaic cells, and the bill even sets aside $6.2 million to promote bicycles as a way to conserve energy. Incentives for developing new, energy-efficient traffic lights could save significant amounts of electricity.

But impressive as the conservation savings are, they amount to only about three months of U.S. energy consumption between now and 2020, according to a preliminary estimate by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

SAN FRANCISCO JAILS: Handling prisoners
Stripped of dignity
Lawsuits mount over jail's practices regarding strip searches, safety cells
Elizabeth Fernandez, Stephanie Salter, Chronicle Staff Writers
Sunday, November 16, 2003

The San Francisco Sheriff's Department for years has conducted inappropriate, abusive and sometimes illegal strip searches on people brought to its jails, a Chronicle investigation found.

After weeks of questioning by Chronicle reporters and facing multiple lawsuits that could result in multimillion-dollar judgments, Sheriff Michael Hennessey says he is changing the way the jail treats prisoners who are now being strip searched and placed in isolation cells.

In accounts going back to the mid-1990s, 14 men and women said they were wrongly subjected to humiliating strip searches. Many told the newspaper that they were dispatched to "safety cells'' designed for suicidal, self-mutilating or otherwise destructive prisoners. While in what jailers call "the hole,'' the former inmates said, they were denied clothing, blankets, sometimes even water - in violation of both state law and the jail's policies.

A confidential report from a branch of Hennessey's own department bolsters many of the people's accounts. The report, requested by Hennessey, warned more than a year ago that "we are out of compliance with state law'' in some policies and practices, and, "in some instances, Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment" of prisoners.

Democrat Wins Runoff Election in Louisiana
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 15 ? Lt. Gov. Kathleen B. Blanco, a Democrat, defeated Piyush Jindal, the Republican whiz kid, to become the first woman elected governor of Louisiana in a runoff on Saturday.

With 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Ms. Blanco finished with 52 percent of the vote, The Associated Press reported.

Ms. Blanco carried her native Cajun area and trounced Mr. Jindal in New Orleans, where he had the endorsement of the Democratic mayor. Ms. Blanco also held her own in Mr. Jindal's home city of Baton Rouge, while Mr. Jindal ran strong in the heavily Republican suburbs of New Orleans, The A.P. said.

"The people of Louisiana have spoken," Ms. Blanco said. "We have sent a new message out to the nation ? that this is a new Louisiana."

Mr. Jindal maintained his sense of humor, and the first words of his concession speech were: "At least, the Tigers won tonight," a reference to the state university's football team.

Mr. Jindal also said that he was "disappointed but not discouraged." He urged businesses to come to the state and his campaign workers to keep working for Louisiana.

Until now, Louisiana had sent an uninterrupted line of white men to the governor's mansion. The only exception was P.B.S. Pinchback, a black Republican who served as acting governor during Reconstruction for 35 days.

Hesiod

For Middle Class, Health Insurance Becomes a Luxury
By STEPHANIE STROM

DALLAS ? The last time Kevin Thornton had health insurance was three years ago, which was not much of a problem until he began having trouble swallowing.

"I broke down earlier this year and went in and talked to a doctor about it," said Mr. Thornton, who lives in Sherman, about 60 miles north of Dallas.

A barium X-ray cost him $130, and the radiologist another $70, expenses he charged to his credit cards. The doctor ordered other tests that Mr. Thornton simply could not afford.

"I was supposed to go back after the X-ray results came, but I decided just to live with it for a while," he said. "I may just be a walking time bomb."

Mr. Thornton, 41, left a stable job with good health coverage in 1998 for a higher salary at a dot-com company that went bust a few months later. Since then, he has worked on contract for various companies, including one that provided insurance until the project ended in 2000. "I failed to keep up the payments that would have been required to maintain my coverage," he said. "It was just too much money."

Mr. Thornton is one of more than 43 million people in the United States who lack health insurance, and their numbers are rapidly increasing because of ever soaring cost and job losses. Many states, including Texas, are also cutting back on subsidies for health care, further increasing the number of people with no coverage.

S.E.C.'s Oversight of Mutual Funds Is Said to Be Lax
By STEPHEN LABATON
The S.E.C. was captive to the industry when writing new regulations and was severely short of staff and money.