• 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

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.''

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.

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.

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.

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.''

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.

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.''

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.

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."

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.

The Black Commentator on our own domestic terrorists:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.