THE FULCRUM

The Bush administration is withholding information from U.N.-sanctioned auditors examining more than $1 billion in contracts awarded to Halliburton Co. and other companies in Iraq without competitive bidding, the head of the international auditing board said Thursday.

The audit, which covers May 2003 to December 2003, asserts that the coalition's management of Iraq's oil was plagued by "inadequate" bookkeeping and accounting systems, high turnover among coalition finance officials and a disregard for procedures designed to ensure competitive bidding for contracts. KPMG is planning to produce a second audit that covers the coalition's management of the program through June 2004.
 
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KPMG outlined a series of other shortcomings, including the coalition's failure to install meters on Iraq's Persian Gulf export loading platforms, making it impossible to determine how much oil Iraq was exporting. KPMG said that it was unable to verify independently the value of crude oil Iraq bartered for Syrian electricity.

Mr. Kerry's remarks, two weeks before he accepts the nomination of a Democratic Party with deep misgivings about the war, indicate the Massachusetts senator isn't preparing to spell out a timetable for rapid withdrawal of the roughly 140,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq. To the contrary, he suggested that Mr. Bush was more likely to do so, saying "I've heard [it] said by many people" that the White House might be gearing up to withdraw troops before the November election.

"I'm prepared for any political move" on Iraq, Mr. Kerry said. "I'd put nothing past them."
 
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"I don't trust this administration's definition of where they're going or what they're going to do," he said. "They've already shifted everything. They shifted the reason for the war. They're capable of shifting anything."

This is a surprise? Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix "group." Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the "team player" with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone "out of step with the American people." Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program.

This nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

Three years after Gov. Jeb Bush announced a new voting system that he called "a model for the rest of the nation," Florida is grappling with some of the same problems that threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, as well as new ones that critics say could cause even more confusion this November.

A recent analysis by The Sun-Sentinel found that touch-screen machines in South Florida failed to record votes eight times more often than optical-scan machines in the March presidential primary.

– UnitedHealth Group Inc. Thursday said its net income rose 36% in the second quarter, and raised its forecast for full-year earnings.

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"We expect strong results from our businesses in the second half of this year," said UnitedHealth Chairman and CEO William W. McGuire, M.D.

July 13, 2004
Ken Mehlman
Campaign Manager
BUSH-CHENEY '04, Inc.


Dear Ken:

Over the past several months, allies of the President have questioned John Kerry’s patriotism while your staff has criticized his service in Vietnam. Republicans and their allies have gone so far as to launch attacks against his wife and your campaign has run $80 million in negative ads that have been called baseless, misleading and unfair by several independent observers.

NASA's $785 million Aura mission to study Earth's atmosphere was stranded on its California launch pad again today, the third launch date this week missed because of technical problems.

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The bus-sized Aura, built for NASA by Northrop Grumman Corp., is designed to monitor the health of the depleted layer of ozone gases in the stratosphere that protect Earth from solar radiation. It will also track pollutants in the atmosphere to see where they travel and how they interact, NASA said.

"The constitutional amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans," McCain said. "It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them."

"The founders wisely made certain that the Constitution is difficult to amend and, as a practical political matter, can't be done without overwhelming public approval. And thank God for that," he said.

In many parts of the country in recent years, strapped local governments have imposed big increases in property-tax rates, as well as in home assessments, to fill budget shortfalls. In response, voters have organized efforts to repeal or slow property-tax boosts in states from Virginia to Oregon, in some cases with the support of frustrated local officials.

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For many homeowners, the increases have eaten into benefits they gained from President Bush's cuts in federal income taxes. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com Inc., a research firm in West Chester, Pa., estimates that nearly a fifth of the income-tax benefit Americans are receiving from federal tax cuts this year is going to pay for higher property taxes. Mr. Zandi says he expects property taxes to continue rising "very rapidly."

The federal government's color-coded threat system is too vague and confusing to help many local and state law enforcement officials prepare for possible terrorist attacks, Congressional investigators said Monday in a report that prompted leading members of Congress to call for an overhaul.

"I'm afraid if we don't make improvements in the system," Mr. Turner said, "the public's going to lose trust and confidence in that system and won't pay any attention to it anymore."

Afghanistan plans to hold its first democratic election in a few months. But in this highland village, a jumble of mud forts set amid terraced orchards and fields of ripe wheat, no one has registered to vote.

Arapat, a farmer with the gilded skullcap and jet-black beard of a Pashtun tribesman, explained that some 60 Taliban insurgents had been to Shelem Kele just three days earlier. "We are all afraid. All the countryside here is under the control of the Taliban," whispered Mr. Arapat, who like many Afghans uses only one name.

Minutes later, the valley echoed with explosions as U.S. Army helicopters lobbed missiles into a mountainside. The same week, a Taliban unit operating just a few miles away executed 16 Afghans found to carry voter-registration cards.

The Bush administration, shelving a Clinton-era decision that put 58.5 million acres of national forests off-limits to development, announced a new rule Monday that will allow the nation's governors to help decide whether roadless areas in their own states should be opened to logging or other commercial activity.

Under the new rule, governors who want to protect pristine areas will have to petition the Forest Service to keep them off-limits to development. The Forest Service will make the final decision about what areas would remain roadless.

U.S. counterterrorism officials are looking at an emergency proposal on the legal steps needed to postpone the presidential election in case of such an attack, Newsweek reported on Sunday.