In one of the oddest enterprises in the history of development economics, Bono -- the lead singer for the rock band U2 — has been touring Africa with Paul O'Neill, secretary of the treasury. For a while, the latent tensions between the two men were masked by Bono's courtesy; but on Monday he lost his cool.

The pair were visiting a village in Uganda, where a new well yielding clean water has radically improved the villagers' health. Mr. O'Neill's conclusion from this, as from the other development projects he saw, was that big improvements in people's lives don't require much money -- and therefore that no big increase in foreign aid is required. By the way, the United States currently spends 0.11 percent of G.D.P. on foreign aid; Canada and major European countries are about three times as generous. The Bush administration's proposed "Millennium Fund" will increase our aid share, but only to 0.13 percent.

Bono was furious, declaring that the projects demonstrated just the opposite, that the well was "an example of why we need big money for development. And it is absolutely not an example of why we don't. And if the secretary can't see that, we're going to have to get him a pair of glasses and a new set of ears."

During a visit to a well in Wakiso, an area outside of Uganda's capital, Kampala, the Treasury secretary emphasized how cheaply the well had been built, noting that it cost $1,000 and provided clean water to more than 400 people. Using "back-of-the-envelope arithmetic," he said, he and Uganda's central bank governor had calculated the night before that wells serving all of the nation's people could be drilled for about $25 million. He questioned why it couldn't be done within a year.

"Last year the World Bank lent $300 million to Uganda," he said later in the day to a university audience. "What was so important that there wasn't $25 million to $30 million to give everyone in Uganda clean water? Where did the money go?"

Percent Spent on Charitable Purpose
This is the portion of total expenses that is spent on charitable programs. In AIP’s view, 60% or greater is reasonable for most charities. The remaining percentage is spent on fundraising and general administration.

But is Mr. O'Neill really blind and deaf to Africa's needs? Probably not. He is caught between a rock star and a hard place: he wants to show concern about global poverty, but Washington has other priorities.

A striking demonstration of those priorities is the contrast between the Bush administration's curt dismissal of the W.H.O. proposal and the bipartisan drive to make permanent the recent repeal of the estate tax. What's notable about that drive is that opponents of the estate tax didn't even try to make a trickle-down argument, to assert that reducing taxes on wealthy heirs is good for all of us. Instead, they made an emotional appeal — they wanted us to feel the pain of those who pay the "death tax." And the sob stories worked; Congress brushed aside proposals to retain the tax, even proposals that would raise the exemption — the share of any estate that is free from tax — to $5 million.

Let's do the math here. An estate tax with an exemption of $5 million would affect only a handful of very wealthy families: in 1999 only 3,300 estates had a taxable value of more than $5 million. The average value of those estates was $16 million. If the excess over $5 million were taxed at pre-2001 rates, the average taxed family would be left with $10 million — which doesn't sound like hardship to me — and the government would collect $20 billion in revenue each year. But no; the whole tax must go.

So here are our priorities. Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don't hesitate. Leave no heir behind!

Which brings us back to the Bono-O'Neill tour. The rock star must have hoped that top American officials are ignorant rather than callous — that they just don't realize what conditions are like in poor countries, and how foreign aid can make a difference. By showing Mr. O'Neill the realities of poverty and the benefits aid can bring, Bono hoped to find and kindle the spark of compassion that surely must lurk in the hearts of those who claim to be compassionate conservatives.

One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself — and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble — have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror.

The F.B.I. took new steps yesterday to expand its powers — allowing it to snoop on mosques, libraries and the Internet, for example — and they make sense. We must also relax a taboo, racial profiling, for one of the lessons of the Moussaoui case is that it sometimes works.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta bars airport security screenings based on religion or ethnicity. That's why aging nuns are plucked out of airport lines for inspections of their denture bags, why women with underwire bras are sometimes subjected to humiliating inspections after the metal detector goes off. But let's be realistic: Young Arab men are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants than are little old ladies, and as such they should be more vigorously searched — though with no less courtesy. El Al, the Israeli airline, has the world's most effective air security system, and it's all about racial profiling.

Charles L. Watson guided Dynegy from a tiny company into a member of the Fortune 500 and just six months ago appeared to have vaulted it into the top ranks of American business by agreeing to acquire Enron.

But that deal, which soon fell apart as Enron collapsed, ended up putting Dynegy under a microscope, and Mr. Watson's position weakened this year with continued disclosures of questionable accounting practices and trading techniques in the energy industry. Dynegy faces an accounting investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, although the company said that had nothing to do with Mr. Watson's departure.

He (Krugman) has criticized Clinton's policies many times, and Reagan's as well. Steel is Bush's screwup, not Clinton's. Let him take the heat.

Krugman says that the president's decision was made for political gain and is anti-free trade -- and he's right.

I'm not exactly sure why, oter [sic] than that he gets his facts right and they don't look pretty for the Bushies, that Krugman pisses everyone off. But I do know he leads the Right to bizzare claims, such as that "GATT" and "NAFTA" are synonymous. How do you disprove a Krugman claim re the former by pointing out a counterexample involving the latter?

I won't address what did or didn't happen during the Reagan years. The pre-Web days of the '80s are difficult to research late at night solely using Internet sources. However, Krugman's claim that Clinton stuck to the strict letter of U.S. trade agreements throughout his 8-year term is false.

The most obvious, most recent and most well-known case was the Clinton administration's refusal to allow Mexican trucks into the U.S., as was required by NAFTA.

Here, he's (Krugman) making a broader point about treaties and Bush's disdain for them. But I agree with you about Krugman's strange obsession with critiquing the president. For example, it's really strange to me that Krugman writes so much about the Bush administration instead of criticizing the trade decisions made by Harry Truman. So unbalanced.

The Reagan administration, despite its free-trade rhetoric, was quite willing to protect industries for political gain; the most notable example was the "voluntary" restraint on Japanese car exports. Still, it was a firm rule that trade interventions had to be "GATT-legal" ? that is, they couldn't violate the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. (The GATT has since been incorporated into the rules of the World Trade Organization.) And that scrupulousness continued up to the end of the Clinton years. [Emphasis mine]

BTW, I don't have the time to do it myself, but someone needs to do a comprehensive sweep of "blogs" that criticize Krugman and just mock the living hell out of them.

In John Ashcroft, the nation not only has a man of God as attorney general, but God's messenger. Ashcroft is not only the most conservative A.G. of modern times, but the most fundamentalist.

Fundamentalists, as we learn daily from the Middle East and beyond, cause more problems than they solve. Fundamentalists believe they are the only righteous ones. Why should our fundamentalists be any different?

Re: "A messenger of God tackles the Constitution" (Opinion, May 23):

Columnist James Goldsborough's attack on Attorney General John Ashcroft is a prime example of the press' latest futile attempt to associate evangelical Christianity with the fanatical Wahabe [sic] branch of Islam, which was primarily responsible for Sept. 11.

In describing Ashcroft, Goldsborough uses the word "fundamentalism" or "fundamentalist" four times in the first two paragraphs in an attempt to build a wordspeak bridge in the mind of the reader between Islamic fundamentalism found in Afghanistan and evangelical Christianity found in America.

Evangelical Christians do not send their sons into shopping malls to blow themselves up in an attempt to kill as many innocent people as they can; nor do they train young people how to commandeer civilian aircraft filled with innocent people in order to ram into tall buildings.

PATRICK MOODY, pastor Del Cerro Baptist Church

I couldn't have done a better job of revealing the fraud of liberalism than Goldsborough did with his column on Ashcroft. What about tolerance? Diversity? Guess they don't apply to a devout Christian like Ashcroft.

Comparing Ashcroft to the Taliban is ridiculous. About the only thing Ashcroft is guilty of is being a goody two-shoes.

I would suggest that the truly intolerant in this country are liberals like Goldsborough.

MICHAEL RUBLE
San Diego

Yet two weeks ago, the Ashcroft Justice Department argued in briefs before the Supreme Court that the Second Amendment gives people the right to own guns. Period.

This extremist position, which attempts to reverse six decades of federal policy, pretends that the Second Amendment's clause about the need for a "well-regulated militia" simply doesn't exist. Ashcroft's position also flies in the face of broad-based U.S. public opinion supporting gun control.

If the framers of the Second Amendment had simply provided that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," even a lawyer would have trouble denying that it creates an individual right like the other "rights of the people" described in the Bill of Rights. But that's not what they did. Instead, they appended an explanatory introduction, so that the constitutional text says: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."


The introductory phrase, however, does not change the meaning of the operative clause, and the Second Amendment means exactly what it would have meant had the preface been omitted. To see why that's so, and also why such an explanatory preface makes perfect sense, one needs to grasp two interrelated arguments. The first is based on the text of the Second Amendment and its relationship with other clauses in the Constitution. The second focuses on the immediate political problem that the preface was meant to address.

Let's start with the text of the Second Amendment. The operative clause protects a "right of the people," which is exactly the same terminology used in the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment. Those two provisions indubitably protect individual (not states') rights, and so does the Second Amendment.

What the introductory phrase tells us is that this individual right is protected, at least in part, because doing so will foster a well-regulated militia.

Rescue workers did not get near them. Photographers could not record their faces. If they were seen at all, it was in glimpses at windows, nearly a quarter-mile up.

Yet like messages in an electronic bottle from people marooned in some distant sky, their last words narrate a world that was coming undone. A man sends an e-mail message asking, "Any news from the outside?" before perching on a ledge at Windows on the World. A woman reports a colleague is smacking useless sprinkler heads with his shoe. A husband calmly reminds his wife about their insurance policies, then says that the floor is groaning beneath him, and tells her that she and their children meant the world to him.

No single call can describe scenes that were unfolding at terrible velocities in many places. Taken together though, the words from the upper floors offer not only a broad and chilling view of the devastated zones, but the only window onto acts of bravery, decency and grace at a brutal time.

Eight months after the attacks, many survivors and friends and relatives of those lost are pooling their recollections, tapes and phone records, and 157 have shared accounts of their contacts for this article. At least 353 of those lost were able to reach people outside the towers. Spoken or written at the hour of death, these are intimate, lasting words. The steep emotional cost of making them public is worth paying, their families say, for a clearer picture of those final minutes.

Rowley wrote that the careers of high-ranking FBI officials have in the past been ruined by poor decisions in high-profile cases. "This in turn resulted in a climate of fear which has chilled aggressive FBI law enforcement action/decisions," she wrote.

She said this atmosphere stems from the FBI's organization as a large hierarchy with numerous layers of supervisors who don't want to risk facing criticism from Congress and the public for their decisions.

You have heard what George W. Bush said about Cuba (for a refresher, go here). Among other things, he said, ?Today, and every day for the past 43 years, [the] legacy of [Cuban] courage has been insulted by a tyrant who uses brutal methods to enforce a bankrupt vision. That legacy has been debased by a relic from another era, who has turned a beautiful island into a prison.? Bush continued, ?[Castro] is a dictator who jails and tortures and exiles his political opponents. . . . [But] through all their pains and deprivation, the Cuban people?s aspirations for freedom are undiminished.? Etc.

Okay, you heard that. And you heard what President Jimmy Carter said about Cuba.

Now hear this. This is Carter in an interview last year: ?I don?t think that George W. Bush has any particular commitment to preservation of the principles of human rights.?

What I think is that Bush has a surer sense of human rights than Carter, who thinks he invented them.

The Reagan administration, despite its free-trade rhetoric, was quite willing to protect industries for political gain; the most notable example was the "voluntary" restraint on Japanese car exports. Still, it was a firm rule that trade interventions had to be "GATT-legal" ? that is, they couldn't violate the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. (The GATT has since been incorporated into the rules of the World Trade Organization.) And that scrupulousness continued up to the end of the Clinton years. Everyone understood that there were certain things that you didn't do, no matter how convenient they might be in terms of short-term political advantage.

In those days, in other words, responsible people ran our international economic policy.

A NAFTA arbitration panel may have finally broken the transport logjam at the US-Mexican border. The panel found that Washington's blanket ban on Mexican trucks moving farther north than the immediate border area violated the 1993 free-trade pact.

That's no surprise. Under the agreement, Mexicans were supposed to have access to border-state highways by 1995, and to all US roadways by 2000. Two things kept that from happening: concerns about the safety of Mexican trucks and drivers, and political opposition from the Teamsters Union (which fears job losses) and some advocacy groups.

Those factors kept the truck ban firmly in place during the Clinton administration.

He must be a pretty reprehensible fellow. You saw him leaving a long, black car with tinted windows, heavily chaperoned by FBI Director Robert Mueller and enveloped by escorts who spirited him up the Capitol steps. You'd have thought that Kenneth Williams was some kind of a mobster.

But he is an FBI agent from Arizona, and the only thing he did wrong was to be right last July about the possibility that Osama bin Laden was using U.S. flight schools to train terrorists. It is not a crime to put two and two together, although you can never be sure with Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Associates said Williams is surprised by the furor his memo created. FBI officials, including Mueller, have noted that none of the subjects named in the memo has been connected by investigators to the Sept. 11 plot, sources said.

Prior to Sept. 11, the FBI did refer the list of names in the memo to the CIA, which concluded that none appeared to have ties to al Qaeda, officials have said. But Williams noted that one of the aviation students was a radical Muslim who had a picture of bin Laden on his wall, while another had made a phone call to a man linked to an al Qaeda associate.

Earlier this month, after finally receiving a copy of the memo, the CIA determined that at least two of the non-flight school students named in the document have ties to al Qaeda based on intelligence gathered since the attacks.

Williams had a secret two-hour session with the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday evening and was on Capitol Hill yesterday for more closed-door sessions. We never saw his face. The Phoenix warning is a profound embarrassment to the intelligence bureaucracy, and Williams is probably lucky to have his job. Let us hope we get the chance to see and hear him. Dot-connectors are hard to find.

Nobody is saying that if his memo had been circulated, the tragedy of Sept. 11 would have been averted. The most dastardly Democrat has not even thought of accusing Bush of dereliction of duty. From the moment the memo surfaced, Republicans have been shrieking that it is unpatriotic to dwell on the past.

President Bush got off a good line about second-guessing being second nature in Washington. But he was pretty steamed that anyone would think he had not done everything in his power to protect the American people.

Vice President Cheney wheeled the heavy artillery through the Sunday television shows and fired warnings that filled the air for the holiday weekend: No one, it seems, is safe -- apartment house dwellers, the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, subways, barbecue pits, trains.

Cheney was both stern and matter of fact. His message to a bewildered nation read, "You want warnings? We'll give you warnings." Brutally, he changed the subject from the scary past to the scary future.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton did exactly what Republicans would have done in her husband's time in office. She took to the floor and cited a headline in the New York Post, "BUSH KNEW." All she said was that her constituents wanted to know what he knew and when.

The administration landed on her. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer castigated her, and from Budapest came a blast from her successor, Laura Bush, who was on tour.

Nobody was surprised that Williams's warning was not heeded or even shared with other agencies. The FBI is notorious for hiding information: At Boston's Logan Airport, where the World Trade Center assassins took off, the bureau refused to share its watch list with state troopers responsible for airport safety. The bureau pores over its data like a miser in his cave with his treasure. It is a prima donna of government bureaus, accustomed for almost 50 years to a doting press and public.

The CIA, which should have been told and wasn't, is also dysfunctional. Overfunded and undersupervised, it has severe identity problems, which have been aggravated in two Bush administrations. It was Bush the Elder's favorite bureaucracy, and the incumbent is equally fond, striving always to find ways to make the spooks look good and elaborately forgiving them for their colossal failure of Sept. 11.

Republicans point out that it is not George Bush's job to sift through batches of warnings and reports. It isn't; it's the CIA's. But the president made the people who should have been analysts into warriors, and they have turned up all over Afghanistan in combat roles. The first U.S. casualty was a CIA man, who first came to our attention as the interrogator of John Walker Lindh.

I happened to be in New York this week as it was trying to digest the news that it may face another ground zero. The city was immaculate, not a candy wrapper in the streets, and somewhat quieter than before it was called upon to be the wonder of the world for its endurance and resilience. "We were just beginning to relax," sighed a Gothamite.

The new mayor, Mike Bloomberg, fits the new mood. He tends to understatement, which the city finds restful; he's not compulsive like his driven predecessor, who whirled through the city in pursuit of trouble. Bloomberg rides the subway without fanfare and with two security men. Rudy Giuliani's heroic performance is not forgotten, but it is less talked of.

Now, apparently, all's to do again. Says Michael Shapiro, Columbia assistant journalism professor, the timing of the proliferating warnings "discomfits" him. The Bush administration is getting criticism for its handling of past events. That just struck him as "too coincidental," Shapiro said.

People don't know whom to believe. They might listen to agent Williams.

Let's go even further: assume that the FBI had information on the exact date, time, flight number, and descriptions of suspects. So they raid all the planes, and arrest the 19 dirtbags.

...And then what? Not much, I imagine. Oh, CAIR and it's ilk would be having a fit, of course, complaining to everyone including George W. about profiling and unfair targeting of Arab-Americans. After all, just what did the FBI find? Some box cutters? Those aren't illegal on airplanes. Flight manuals? These men were all attending accredited flight schools, trying to achieve the American dream, etc. etc. So they had one-way tickets: is that a crime? Funeral shrouds? Are you honestly arresting these men for bringing white sheets onto a plane? Korans? So because these men are pious Muslims, you dare to assume...! And really, folks, come on: flying a Boeing into a skyscraper? You've been watching too many movies! Who would come up with something this complicated, when a truck bomb in a garage would do just as well?

And so on and so on. I'm sure at least half these men would have been released within a couple of days. Profiling would be discussed at length on CNN and PBS. Several specials would be made, with weeping, hijab-wearing photogenic young women, describing in perfect Midwestern English the ordeal of being singled out by airport security. American Airlines would issue an apology, and make a contribution to the Arab-American Anti-Defamation Society, with a promise of more "outreach efforts." Norman Mineta would be outraged! and put in all sorts of new restrictions designed specifically to avoid giving extra scrutiny to "people of Middle Eastern appearance." (hey! wait a second!) George W. would go on the record saying that "pro-filling" is "discriminatational" and against everything he holds dear. Clinton would tell a story of his Lebanese-American great-uncle who was once denied entry into the White House. Al Gore would talk about his years of service under Lawrence of Arabia. Pretty soon, the whole thing would be forgotten as another embarrasing example of the Latent Racism in American Society.

Until one day, another group of men board an airliner...

HOW IS STAR WARS RACIST? LET US COUNT THE WAYS. Tapped finds it disturbing that Star Wars creator and philosopher king George Lucas still can't understand why anyone got p.o.-ed about Jar Jar Binks. Furthermore, we found the scene in Attack of the Clones, in which Anakin Skywalker wantonly slaughters a village worth of wigwam-inhabiting Tuskan Raiders who have kidnapped a white woman, to be uncomfortably reminiscent of a scene from this country's troubled expansionist history. Still, all of that said, this is ridiculous.

["I] would suggest to you that the single most important innovation shaping [America's] capital market was the idea of generally accepted accounting principles." So declared Lawrence Summers, then deputy secretary of the Treasury, in a 1998 speech. Mr. Summers urged troubled Asian economies, then in the middle of a disastrous financial crisis, to emulate American-style "transparency and disclosure."

Now America has its own problems with corporate accounting, exemplified by Enron. So will we follow our own advice? Will we provide investors with the facts they need to make informed decisions? Probably not. And that's bad news, because Enron's case, though extreme, was by no means unique.

For corporate America as a whole, 1997 was a watershed year. According to government statistics, overall corporate profits grew rapidly between 1992 and 1997, but then stalled; after-tax profits in the third quarter of 2000 were barely higher than they were three years earlier. But the operating earnings of the S.&P. 500 - that is, the profits companies reported to investors - grew 46 percent over those three years.

There are technical reasons that these measures of profits need not grow at exactly the same rate, but they have historically tracked each other fairly well. So why did they suddenly diverge? Surely the main reason was that after 1997 companies made increasingly aggressive use of accounting gimmicks to create the illusion of profit growth.

You see, corporate leaders were desperate to keep their stock prices rising, in an environment where anything short of 20 percent profit growth was considered failure. And why were they desperate? In a word: options. The bull market, combined with ever-more-generous options packages, led to an explosion of executive compensation. In 1980 chief executives at large companies, according to Business Week's estimates, earned 45 times as much as non-supervisory workers. By 1995, however, the ratio had risen to 160; by 1997, it had reached 305. C.E.O.'s wanted to keep the good times rolling, and they did: by 2000, though profits hadn't really increased, they were paid 458 times as much as ordinary workers.

The point here isn't that top executives are overpaid, though they surely are; it's that the way they are paid rewards them for creating the illusion of success, never mind the reality.

Still, that's exactly the kind of thing that accounting standards are supposed to prevent. What allowed our corporate emperors to hide their nakedness was a combination of poorly crafted standards, which I wrote about last week, and compliant auditors. Major accounting firms were all too happy to be deceived by corporate smoke and mirrors, as long as they got lucrative consulting contracts.

Time for reform? Not according to some people. Today the Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to take up a bill drafted by Paul Sarbanes, the committee's chairman, that would take some modest steps toward accounting and auditing reform. The bill has been endorsed by some of the most respected names in finance ? people like Paul Volcker, the great former Fed chairman, and John Bogle, the famed investor. But Senator Phil Gramm, throwing his weight behind an all-out lobbying effort by the accounting industry, has made it clear that he will try to kill the bill.

I'd like to be nonpartisan here ? really I would. And there are indeed Democrats who have gotten large contributions from accounting firms. But the current effort to prevent any meaningful accounting reform is explicitly a Republican initiative, one directed from the very top: The New York Times reports that Mr. Gramm is "working closely with the Bush administration" in his efforts to block the Sarbanes bill.

Let me repeat what I said last time: Honesty in corporate accounting isn't a left-right issue; it's about protecting all investors from exploitation by insiders. By blocking reform of a broken system, the Bush administration is favoring the interests of a tiny corporate oligarchy over those of everyone else.

One final thought: This isn't just a question of treating American investors fairly. Like the Asian nations before their crisis, the United States relies heavily on inflows of foreign capital, inflows that depend on international faith in the integrity of U.S. markets. The Bush administration may believe that investors have nowhere else to go, that the money will keep coming even if we don't reform. That's what Suharto thought, too.

On the Way to the Fundraiser
Stopovers Let Bush Charge Taxpayers for Political Trips

President Bush and the White House have set aside earlier worries about the president openly engaging in political matters, launching an unabashedly partisan effort for November's congressional elections.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, along with his colleagues in the House, has decided to put aside earlier pledges for unity in the war on terrorism, launching an unabashedly partisan effort to paint the president's actions leading up to Sept. 11 as something just short of treason.

Bush came to office with promises to govern by "principle, not politics," and to "change the tone" of Washington discourse. He had a reputation for such actions as governor of Texas, and some of his first actions in Washington -- backing a vast tax cut, despite polls indicating weak support for it, and negotiating with liberal Democrats over education reform -- supported this reputation.

Since Sept. 11, Bush had carefully balanced his twin roles as commander in chief and leader of the Republican Party.

But now, advisers to Bush have concluded that he and his staff have no choice but to play an overtly political role in the months before November's elections. Advisers to the president say they have concluded that it is impossible to work with Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and that they must restore Republican rule in that chamber to have any hope of enacting Bush's agenda.

Bush "is trying to do two things simultaneously that are diametrically opposed: staying above the fray in appealing to the urge to sacrifice of Americans, while demonizing almost 50 percent of us," said Jim Jordan, director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Increasingly, though, Bush and his aides have made aggressive use of many of the tactics he deplored when the Clinton administration employed them. For example, Washington Monthly magazine calculated from Republican National Committee filings that Bush's pollsters received nearly $1 million in 2001 -- half as much as President Bill Clinton's pollsters got during that administration's first year but a tidy sum for a president who says he does not use polls.

What they should be concerned about are the campaign contributions Davis has received from various special interests after his administration has made decisions that profit those interests.

Like the Davis administration's no-bid software contract with Oracle. Only days after the governor's top aides consummated the sweetheart deal ? which will cost the state's taxpayers an unnecessary $41 million ? Davis received a $25,000 donation from the software maker.

Then there's the governor's suspicious flip-flop on a tax break for the insurance industry. In 1999, Davis vetoed a bill that would have preserved the tax break, worth millions of dollars, arguing that it was "neither fair nor in keeping with sound taxation principles."

But after receiving more than $250,000 in campaign contributions from Fireman's Fund Insurance Companies, the governor reversed himself. He now is supporting the insurance industry's case before the Franchise Tax Board, arguing that it is a matter of fairness.

And Oracle and Fireman's Fund are hardly aberrations. Just this past weekend, in fact, Davis picked up a $260,000 campaign contribution from the California Pipe Trade Council.

The trade union was feeling generous toward the governor after the Davis-appointed Building Standards Commission issued a ruling earlier this month keeping plastic water pipe from replacing copper pipe in homes. The union opposes using plastic pipe because it is cheaper and easier to install than traditional copper. It so happens that California is one of only two states that continue to prohibit plastic pipe in homes.

The governor insists that the policies, the decisions, the actions of his administration are not driven by campaign contributions. But California voters are to be forgiven for suspecting otherwise.

Why does S.&P. ? along with Warren Buffett, Alan Greenspan and just about every serious financial economist ? think that current accounting standards require a drastic overhaul? And if such an overhaul is needed, why doesn't the government do it? Why does S.&P. think that it must do the job itself?

So who could possibly be opposed? You'd be surprised.

Harvey Pitt, the accounting-industry lawyer who heads the Securities and Exchange Commission, has clearly been dragging his feet on reform. And his boss, George W. Bush, has declared himself opposed to treating stock options as a business expense. Wouldn't it be nice, just once, to see the Bush administration oppose the interests of a privileged elite?

But the administration is not alone in its foot-dragging. In fact, perhaps the biggest foot-dragger of all is Senator Joseph Lieberman. Way back in 1994 Mr. Lieberman gave crucial aid to lobbyists trying to head off new accounting standards, which would have forced companies to recognize the cost of options; now he is once again defending the status quo, urging his colleagues to go slow.

Some politicians do see the problem; John McCain and Carl Levin have introduced legislation to reform America's accounting standards. But it seems unlikely that government will fix our dysfunctional accounting rules anytime soon.

ANNE ROBINSON: AMERICANS ARE DUMB

EXCLUSIVE: Quiz Queen says: Only 5% of them have passports and they act as if Dubya's Einstein

Does she think Americans are definitively more stupid than the Brits? "You have to remember that only five per cent of Americans have passports," she says. "That explains a lot..."

America, You are the Weakest Link, Goodbye! "On one US show I asked a young soap star how many minutes there were in half an hour," Anne says, wearily. "And she said 60."

Last year she upset Americans by declaring that few US citizens knew anywhere outside of Idaho - and she despairs of her Stateside contestants.

"You can always tell Texans," she says. "They wear big, bright, multi- coloured sweaters. Every time I see one, I think God's made another rainbow. Then you get the clean-shaven Right-wing Christian types. The Jews on our team are always laughing at them saying: 'He wouldn't have let us hide in his attic.'"

One of the best places to accept Brock's challenge is at the university where he became a conservative. As Brock tells the story, his life changed profoundly during his sophomore year when he covered a February 15, 1983 campus speech by United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick for the Daily Californian, a school newspaper.

Protesters repeatedly heckled Kirkpatrick, a supporter of President Reagan's anticommunist foreign policy in Central America, and she walked off the stage in frustration. The protest spurred a national debate over campus free speech.

"The scene shook me deeply," Brock recalled in Blinded by the Right. "Was the harassment of an unpopular speaker the legacy of the Berkeley-campus Free Speech Movement, when students demanded the right to canvass for any and all political causes on the campus's Sproul Plaza? Wasn't free speech a liberal value? How, I wondered, could this thought police call itself liberal? As I raced back to the threadbare offices of the Daily Cal, where we tapped out stories on half-sheets of paper hunched over manual typewriters, my adrenaline was pumping. I knew I had the day's lead story."

In fact, Brock did not have any story in the next day's Daily Cal. The byline atop the Kirkpatrick story belonged to Chris Norton, a freelancer who expressed disbelief when told that Brock claims to have written that day's main story. "He didn't write the story," Norton said. "I wrote the story."

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — The Palestinian gunmen holed up in the Church of the Nativity and later deported by Israel seized church stockpiles of food and "ate like greedy monsters" until the food ran out, while more than 150 civilians went hungry.

They also guzzled beer, wine and Johnnie Walker scotch that they found in priests' quarters, undeterred by the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol.

Catholic priests said that some Bibles were torn up for toilet paper, and many valuable sacramental objects were removed.

Further to your expose of Krugman's campaign of deliberate misinformation, a venerable principle in tax law, perhaps best articulated by the famous Judge Learned Hand in Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809 (2d. Cir 1934), is appropriate: "Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes." U.S. v. Isham, 17 Wall. 496, 506, 21 L.Ed. 728; Bullen v. Wisconsin, 240 U.S. 625, 630, 36 S.Ct. 473, 60 L.Ed. 830.

I just read your comments on the execrable Paul Krugman's column. Let me add one more point.

Krugman evidently does not know the difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Tax evasion is when you violate the law in order to pay less in taxes. For example, you fail to declare income or you claim deductions which are not based on fact. Tax evasion is a crime and people go to jail for it. And rightly so.

Tax avoidance is when you obey the law in such a way as to reduce the amount you owe in taxes. For example, you may structure a business deal in a way that will reduce your tax liability. Tax avoidance is legal. The government can write the tax laws any way it likes, so if it writes it in a way that allows you to reduce your tax liability, there is nothing legally wrong with taking advantage of it.

Thugman--er, Krugman--uses the term "tax evasion" to describe companies incorporating in Bermuda. But he also uses the term "loophole." A loophole is what you call a provision of the tax code which enables a taxpayer to reduce tax liability in a way that you think is poor public policy. In other words, a loophole is part of the law. Evidently these corporations are acting entirely within the law. They are engaged in tax avoidance, which is entirely legal, though you might argue it's morally dubious. (But do you arrange your financial affairs so as to maximize your tax liability? I doubt it. I don't think anyone is under a moral obligation to do so.) They are not engaged in tax evasion, which is a crime. Krugman would like to make what they're doing a crime, and I suppose there's a policy argument for that. But he is, characteristically, overstating his case. Indeed, I think one could argue that he's libelling the corporations he's complaining about, by accusing them of violating the criminal law in one breath while conceding that they are not violating the criminal law in another. Accusing someone falsely of committing a crime, when it's obvious that you know they're not, is a pretty nasty libel.

Michael Barone