At the same time, CIA and DIA analysts were citing other reports from Iraqi expatriates and defectors claiming the UAVs were designed as delivery systems. But Air Force analysts dismissed these accounts as either outdated or not credible, Boyd said.

Spokesman Scott McClellan says President Bush still believes actual chemical and/or biological weapons will be discovered in Iraq. He says Mr. Bush wants weapons investigator David Kay to "pull together" the facts on Iraq's WMD, CBS News White House Correspondent Peter Maer reports.

U.S. officials suspect that some of the intelligence used to justify the war against Iraq came from defectors who were lying or reporting false information planted by Saddam 's regime, The Los Angeles Times reports. Some former weapons inspectors believe many of the suspicions about Iraq's alleged stockpiles may be because of bad bookkeeping in Baghdad.

A retired U.S. military intelligence officer says Iraqi defectors have made independent allegations that weapons are being stored in Iraq's mosques.

[H]as a MSc in Physics from the University of Michigan (United States) and a PhD in Nuclear Reactor Technology from the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom). Khadduri worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. He was able to leave Iraq in late 1998 with his family.

Still, that doesn't mean he gets to make all the decisions. He wanted to name their new home "Hacienda del Pastor." She convinced him that the house, a red-brick, two-story home with white columns, doesn't look like a hacienda.

So "Hacienda del Pastor" has become "Pecan Manor," named after the trees that dot the front lawn.

President Bush's top political adviser is on his way to Phoenix to raise funds for an Arizona congressman who hasn't yet accounted for finances in his first campaign.

[edit]

[Rick] Renzi, a Flagstaff and Virginia insurance executive, spent about $1.2 million in his 2002 race for the rural District 1 seat, about half of it personal loans to his campaign.

Despite repeated inquiries from the Federal Election Commission, his campaign committee has not rectified numerous errors in accounting for donations and expenditures.

In Mr. Clark's words, Ronald Reagan was "truly a great American leader," who "helped our country win the Cold War." His successor, George Bush, demonstrated "courage" and "vision" in postwar Europe, exercising "tremendous leadership and statesmanship."

The general also sang the praises of the current GOP leadership in Washington: "I'm very glad we've got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul O'Neill--people I know very well--our president, George W. Bush. We need them there, because we've got some tough challenges ahead in Europe."

[edit]

Mr. Clark was asked about those remarks at yesterday's Democratic debate, and he replied that the country had made "an incredible journey" since September 2001 and that Mr. Bush had "recklessly cut taxes" and "recklessly took us into Iraq." We'd say the retired general has made a rather astonishing journey himself, and the public will have to judge the sincerity of his conversion.

Look, in politics they told me--I don't know anything about politics now, I want to make that clear. But they told me--I read, do my reading in Time magazine and so forth. And they said in politics you've always got to protect your base. Well, for the United States, our base is Europe. We've got to be there, and we've got to be engaged in Europe. And that means we've got to take care of NATO, we've got to make sure the Europeans stay in it, and we've got to stay with the problem in the Balkans, even though we don't like it. We will get it resolved, and we'll help bring democracy and Westernization to those countries there.

New Bridge Strategies, LLC is a unique company that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Its activities will seek to expedite the creation of free and fair markets and new economic growth in Iraq, consistent with the policies of the Bush Administration. The opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, D.C. and on the ground in Iraq.

New Bridge Strategies principals have years of public policy experience, have held positions in the Reagan Administration and both Bush Administrations and are particularly well suited to working with international agencies in the Executive Branch, Department of Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the American rebuilding apparatus and establishing early links to Congress.

A Georgia school board, after being threatened with a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), deleted the word "Christmas" from the school calendar.

Against its lawyer's advice, the Newton County school board is changing the designation of the two-week break at the end of the year from "winter holidays" to "Christmas holidays."

"This is a Christian country, and it is founded on Christian values with God in mind," said board member Richard Tiede. " `Winter holidays' came as a result of political correctness."

Dr. Hibbert: [gasps] My God, that's monstrous. I've never heard of anything so negligent -- I'll have no part of it! [Turns his back on Homer.]

Homer: Can you recommend a doctor who will?

Hibbert: [turns around again] Yes.

The Justice Department announced today that it was willing to allow a federal trial judge to dismiss the indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in an American court with conspiring in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, in order to move the case into an appeals court where the charges could be quickly reinstated.

The department's announcement that it would not oppose a defense request for dismissal cleared the way for the judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, to throw out the case against Mr. Moussaoui as early as Friday.

The judge, in district court in Alexandria, Va., had already signaled that she might have no other option because of the government's refusal to allow Mr. Moussaoui and his court-appointed lawyers to interview captured terrorists from Al Qaeda who might provide valuable defense testimony.

[edit]

Officials of the Bush administration have also made clear that if Mr. Moussaoui cannot be prosecuted in a civilian court because of the question of defense witnesses, he will be moved to a military tribunal, where he may have fewer rights to seek testimony from the captured terrorists.

[edit]


The Justice Department, acting at the instruction of the White House and under pressure from the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency, had said the government could not make the captured Qaeda leaders available for defense questioning.

[edit]

But defense lawyers have argued, and Judge Brinkema and many outside prominent criminal law specialists have agreed, that Mr. Moussaoui cannot receive a fair trial without access to witnesses who clearly know whether he was involved in the Sept. 11 conspiracy and other Qaeda plots.

Judge Brinkema : [gasps] My God, that's monstrous. This court cannot allow this trial to move forward so long as you continue to violate Mr. Moussaoui's 6th Amendment rights and refuse to allow him to question individuals who might provide valuable defense testimony. I've never heard of anything so illeg -- I'll have no part of it! [Turns his back on Ashcroft.]

Ashcroft: Can you recommend a court that will?

Brinkema: [turns around again] Yes.

ANOTHER FITTING TRIBUTE TO CONGRESS [Jed Babbin]

There were eight House members who voted against the bill to save the "Do Not Call" list at the FTC.

Bishop (UT) 202-225-0453

Meek (FL) 202-225-4506

Strickland 202-225-5705

Cannon 202-225-7751

Paul 202-225-2831

Terry 202-225-4155

Flake 202-225-2635

Ryan (OH) 202-225-5261

It would really be tooooooo bad if Corner readers called them at the same time, say, noon Monday?

The U.N. nuclear watchdog has found traces of arms-grade enriched uranium at a second site in Iran, a month before a U.N. deadline for Tehran to prove it has no secret atomic weapons program, diplomats said on Thursday.

Earlier this week, The Washington Post reported that after two years of legalized homosexual "marriage" in the Netherlands, public perceptions of a difference between heterosexual and homosexual couples have almost vanished. Activists in Amsterdam claim that homosexual couples are "just like any other married couple" and that "the only thing that makes their marriage unusual" is that they are both the same sex. They point to acceptance by relatives, neighbors and even "conservative" politicians as evidence of the similarities between heterosexual and same-sex "marriage."

In a public school in St. Louis, a teacher spotted the suspect, fourth-grader Raymond Raines, bowing his head in prayer before lunch. The teacher stormed to Raymond's table, ordered him to stop immediately and sent him to the principal's office. The principal informed the young malefactor that praying was not allowed in school. When Raymond was again caught praying before meals on three separate occasions, he was segregated from other students, ridiculed in front of his classmates, and finally sentenced to a week's detention.

The 10-year-old boy in St. Louis whom House Speaker-to-be Newt Gingrich said was put in detention for saying grace in a public school cafeteria was in fact disciplined for matters entirely unrelated to praying in school, according to the superintendent of St. Louis schools.

Gingrich highlighted the case on NBC's Meet the Press Sunday as evidence that public schools are repressing the rights of students who wish to pray. But the case of Raymond Raines is being contested in federal court in St. Louis, and the facts are far from clear.

"He was disciplined for some matters that were totally independent of silent praying,'' Superintendent David Mahan said. "We did a very thorough investigation. We talked to teachers, administrators and also to some students, and we could not find any evidence of the allegations that the parent and the student made.''

But school officials said the incident never happened. Rather, they said, Raymond was disciplined for fighting in the cafeteria.

"I can tell you he was not reprimanded for praying," said Kenneth Brostron, the school's lawyer. "Do you think it makes sense that the teachers would look around the cafeteria and target the one student who was praying quietly at his seat?"

Calling the report that Raymond was caught praying "absolutely not true," school Principal Cleveland Young said: "How would I even know about something like that?"

O'REILLY: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) in the USA (UNINTELLIGIBLE) send a couple of divisions up there, in conjunction with American Special Forces, and (UNINTELLIGIBLE)?

On Tuesday, during a closed-door session of the House GOP leadership, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said that the battle in Congress to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration is a fight over whether energy exploration will be allowed in similarly sensitive areas in the future, a statement that surprised even Republicans in the room.

According to several GOP sources, DeLay insisted that backing down on ANWR would be a mistake for those who support the measure, popular with the oil industry, although DeLay also acknowledged that the provision was likely to fare poorly in the Senate because of opposition from Democrats and GOP moderates.

“It’s about the precedent,” DeLay told the assembled Republican leaders while making several references to the “symbolism of ANWR,” according to GOP sources.

DeLay even joked that a victory on ANWR would allow the oil industry to push into other pristine areas, “except for the coast of California.” Rep. John Doolittle (R-Calif.), the GOP Conference secretary and one the most hard-line Republicans in the House, then responded that drilling off California was “OK with him.”

Several GOP insiders were startled that DeLay contradicted the Bush administration line on the issue. Officials have stressed repeatedly that the battle over ANWR was not symbolic, but rather about the resources that could be tapped there.

“I was surprised to hear that position stated so openly,” said a Republican source who attended the meeting. “He came right out and said it. There wasn’t any beating around the bush.” [Emphasis mine.]

WRONG AGAIN. Michael Tomasky argues today at TAP Online that the right's entire strategy of tainting Clark by association with Clinton is based on a faulty premise: the assumption that people will automatically hate someone who's associated with Clinton. The problem: Americans don't hate Clinton. A vocal minority does. But those people are very much a minority. Didn't Republicans learn this lesson in 1998? Most Americans simply don't share the right's frothing hatred of all things Clinton.

Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the House majority whip, is getting married next month.

The wedding is planned for mid-October, Taylor said. This will be the second marriage for Blunt, 53, who got divorced last year, and the first for [Abigail] Perlman, 41.

Perlman is a lobbyist -- the head of government affairs for Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris:

Their relationship became controversial in June, after The Washington Post reported that Blunt tried to slip language aiding Philip Morris into a homeland security bill last year.

Isn't that romantic? I mean, anybody can send flowers, but nothing says "I love you" like diverting homeland security funding to Big Tobacco.

Theirs has been a classic, whirlwind Beltway love story. Rep. Blunt finished up the paperwork on his divorce. Altria finished up the paperwork on a new policy recusing Perlman from lobbying House leadership.

The soon-to-be Mrs. Majority Whip will still be allowed to lobby rank and file members of the House. Those representatives will, of course, feel no pressure to grant her undue access or influence just because she's married to the No. 3 man in the House leadership.

Rumor has it the couple is registered with Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel and several appropriations committees.

[T]he sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime's ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

PRESIDENT WHO? [John Derbyshire]
An excellent point from a reader: "All of the Dems' words about Vietnam, Kissinger, Nixon etc. have one purpose: to Republicanize the war. Keep howling about Nixon and Kissinger and there is no space to write the word: Johnson. Most young people never hear the name Johnson in connection with that war, yet he signed my draft notice. In fact I call Johnson the invisible president. Every hear his name mentioned? Ever? The Dems' record on Vietnam is not in the consciousness of today's young people. The war as taught in schools today is strictly a Nixon/Republican war."

The president of the United States decides to go to war against a nation led by a brutal dictator supported by one-party rule. That dictator has made war on his neighbors. The president decides this is a threat to the United States.

In his campaign for president he gives no indication of wanting to go to war. In fact, he decries the overextension of American military might and says other nations must do more. However, unbeknownst to the American public, the president's own Pentagon advisers have already cooked up a plan to go to war. All they are looking for is an excuse....

The president was Lyndon Johnson [Emphasis mine].

In the fall of 1995, McLaughlin and Micewski, who were working for the OAG's Bureau of Narcotics Investigations (BNI), discovered that a State Department-backed Dominican Republic political party was raising campaign funds for its presidential candidate by selling heroin and cocaine in Philadelphia, New York and Massachusetts.

In late March 1996, they, along with DEA agents in New York, tried to seize a half-million dollars in campaign funds from the visiting presidential candidate Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, claiming the money came from drug deals. The attempted seizure was called off by the State Department. Two weeks later, in April 1996, then-U.S. Attorney Mike Stiles and District Attorney Lynne Abraham told the OAG that they would no longer prosecute cases brought to them by McLaughlin and Micewski or use their testimony, essentially ending their careers as narcotics investigators. Eventually, the prosecutors refused to bring to trial more than 80 accused drug offenders investigated by McLaughlin and Micewski -- even though two separate investigations, one by Deputy Attorney General Eric Noonan and one by the FBI -- found that the officers had done nothing wrong and even though Abraham's chief assistant, Arnold Gordon, admitted in court that he might have unfairly stigmatized the agents.

McLaughlin and Micewski -- later dubbed the "Bastard Squad" by an OAG supervisor -- fought to clear their names.

They made their case in memos and in grievances and, eventually, in a lawsuit, filed Oct. 14, 1997, alleging that "a Dominican drug organization, through the protection of certain persons in the State Department and the CIA, was effective in having plaintiff's law enforcement efforts stopped and their careers destroyed."

Less than a month later, McLaughlin and Micewski were transferred to busy-work jobs in the hinterlands: McLaughlin to Greensberg; Micewski to Wilkes-Barre.

On Oct. 2, 1998, they filed a retaliation suit, claiming that Attorney General Mike Fisher and his command -- who inherited the Bastard Squad problem when Fisher took office in January 1997 -- used those transfers, and other forms of mistreatment, as punishment for filing the first suit.

[edit]

[A]n eight-member federal jury in Wilkes-Barre decided that Attorney General Mike Fisher and members of his senior staff must pay the two former investigators a total of $1.5 million as punishment for retaliating against them. The verdict is a huge victory, wiping away the stain of seven years of rumor and innuendo.

Fisher holds the remarkable distinction among President Bush's nominees of having been found by a jury to have violated the federal civil rights of state employees, while his nomination was being vetted by the White House.

[edit]

A Fisher spokesman said he would appeal—an appeal that of course would be heard by the Third Circuit, the very court to which Fisher has been nominated.

The primary goal of our coalition in Iraq is self-government for the people of Iraq, reached by orderly and democratic process.

This process must unfold according to the needs of Iraqis, neither hurried nor delayed by the wishes of other parties.

And the United Nations can contribute greatly to the cause of Iraq self-government.

Most remarkable, Mr. Bush had nothing new to say about the struggle to stabilize Iraq and establish a new government .... If the president's intention was to rally international support for a vital cause, the burden of which cannot and should not be borne so disproportionately by the United States, he missed an important opportunity.

Last Wednesday, a California teenager died at a hospital in Pleasanton, just days after taking prescription pills to abort her early pregnancy. The circumstances surrounding her death are unclear, and an autopsy is under way.

But battle lines are already being drawn, with opponents of abortion saying the death of the woman, Holly Patterson, 18, shows why the abortion pills are too dangerous to remain on the market, while abortion providers say it shows no such thing.

"We're sorry to say that this is what we warned would happen," said Wendy Wright, senior policy director at Concerned Women of America, which opposes abortions. "This drug needs to be taken off the market."

Congress looks to be moving this week to change a practice that has annoyed and angered folks in the military for more than 20 years. Seems that most military personnel receive $8.10 a day as a food allowance -- not exactly an extravagance.

But under current rules, injured troops who are hospitalized -- and able to receive free gourmet hospital food -- must reimburse the government for that $8.10 allowance. This didn't seem right to Staff Sgt. William L. Murwin, who was injured in Iraq after an Iraqi kid dropped a grenade into his Humvee.

The explosion sent Murwin to the hospital for 26 days and left him a partial amputee. After the Marine reservist got back home to Nevada in July and to his job as a sheriff's deputy, he was hit with a bill for $210.60 for his hospital food.

This didn't seem right to Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) either. Many service members "will be handicapped for the rest of their lives," he told the St. Petersburg Times, "and we're asking them to pay $8.10 for their food!"

So Young and his wife, Beverly, who has been active in helping injured military personnel, paid Murwin's bill, and Young introduced a measure a few weeks ago to change the law so service members injured in combat or training won't be charged for food.

He has inserted language in the fiscal 2004 defense appropriations measure, expected to be approved today by the House, which would soon stop the bills from going out for one year. Young has 193 co-sponsors on legislation to change the law.

If you [Democrats, the DLC, etc...] succeed in using dirty tricks to topple Dean, I will not be voting in 04, and I know a lot of other Democrats who will join me in sitting it out.

My own feeling is that the only real Democrats are those who will support the party's eventual nominee, end of story.

Bush said he insulates himself from the "opinions" that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories.

"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

It's hard to tell whether this law is more a product of arrogance or ignorance, but either way it's shaping up to be a spectacular train wreck of a collision between bureaucracy and reality.

When Bush was stumping for his "jobs and growth" tax cut proposal in April, he went to Timken Co., a maker of steel bearings in Canton, Ohio. "The greatest strength of the American economy is found right here," Bush said then, predicting the tax cut would bring "more money for investment, more money for growth, and more money for jobs."

A month later, Bush signed a $350 billion tax cut, less than he wanted but still what he called "a bold package."

And Timken? The company announced last week that it is cutting 900 jobs and lowering its earnings forecasts.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft yesterday issued new guidelines to the nation's U.S. attorneys, requiring that they pursue the toughest charges they can reasonably hope to prove in criminal cases and limit their use of plea bargains.

The changes, combined with the attorney general's efforts earlier this year to seek the stiffest sentences possible, are intended to make the enforcement of criminal laws more uniform across the country. But they are seen by some prosecutors and judges as a serious erosion of their discretion in criminal cases.

The Bush administration has decided to pursue a 16-year-old effort to deport two Palestinian activists who as students distributed magazines and raised funds for a group the government now considers a terrorist organization, despite several court rulings that the deportations are unconstitutional because the men were not involved in terrorist activity.

The case, which has long had a high profile among Palestinian Americans, could pose a new judicial test of a controversial provision in the Patriot Act, passed in 2001. The provision prohibits supplying material support for organizations the government deems "terrorist," even without evidence of a link to specific terrorist acts.

[edit]

In seeking the deportation in 1987 of Hamide, Shehadeh and six other Palestinian immigrants allegedly associated with the PFLP, the Reagan administration's Justice Department invoked a provision of the Cold War-era McCarran-Walter Act, which barred membership in communist groups. But a lawsuit filed by the so-called L.A. 8 led a federal appeals court to declare the law an unconstitutional infringement of free speech, and Congress repealed it in 1990.

The deportation cases nonetheless continued to churn through the courts because Congress's action did not affect pending disputes. Then-FBI Director William Webster conceded in 1987 that none of the eight had engaged in terrorist activity and that they would not have been arrested if they were U.S. citizens. Civil liberties groups charged that the government was wrongly excluding the immigrants from traditional protections of free speech and association.

Six of the cases were ultimately deemed minor technical violations. In January, the Bush administration was given a summer deadline for declaring whether it would still seek to invoke the McCarran Act. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it would pursue the deportations but drew on the language of the Patriot Act.

Airline executives, industry analysts and privacy groups said yesterday that JetBlue might have to do more to appease fliers than issue an apology to those who complained about its decision to share information on 1.1 million customers with a Pentagon contractor investigating security issues.

While analysts said they doubted the disclosure would do more than scuff the airline's reputation, the industry was still shaking its head over an unexpected black eye to the airline, an aviation darling since it began flights in 2000.

In reaction to the uproar over its action, JetBlue said late yesterday that it had retained the accounting firm Deloitte & Touche for help in the "continued development" of its privacy policy. It said the firm would help the airline refine its standards regarding customer data.

Gareth Edmondson-Jones, a spokesman for JetBlue, said in a telephone interview that the decision to provide the passenger information to Torch Concepts was a clear violation of the company's own policy. "We have the strongest privacy policy in the industry, which clearly says that we don't supply customer data to third parties," he said.

Groups such as Coalition for a Fair Judiciary, an umbrella organization for 75 other center-to-right-leaning groups, plan to implement an electoral pledge in the next few weeks, similar to the “no new taxes” pledge first signed by President Reagan in the 1980s.

The organization’s president, Kay Daly, said the oath will ask each Democratic Senate candidate next year whether he will support an up or down vote on each of the president’s nominees. Refusal to make the pledge will be publicized by the group.

“They’ll be labeled enemies of the Constitution,” she said.

Now, why is Bill Clinton pushing Wes Clark? The Clinton people are climbing on the Clark bandwagon. This is the way to stop Howard Dean. Now, why does Clinton want to stop Howard Dean? Could it be that he wants to wait and see and perhaps Hillary will get into this with General Clark as her vice president? Will he prefer to let someone else run and lose and, thereby, have a clear field for Hillary Clinton to run in 2008? What’s going on underneath the coverage? It’s just terrific.

Bill, you realize your two arguments are in a head-on collision with each other. Either they want Wesley Clark in the race to stop Howard Dean so that the field can be cleared for Hillary or they want Howard Dean to win so that they can lose in ’04 and the field can be cleared for Hillary in 2008. The fact is it’s almost too complicated for them.

Under strong pressure from the Bush administration, Colombia's government has signed an agreement that exempts Americans arrested in this war-battered country for human rights violations from prosecution before the new International Criminal Court.

The agreement, signed late Wednesday, means that $130 million in American aid to Colombia — assistance Washington had threatened to withhold — will proceed as planned. Sixty-one poor nations heavily dependent on American aid have signed similar agreements.

[Administration officials] say Fox was selected not to "pander" to a conservative audience, as one put it, but because the network had not previously been granted an interview during the Bush presidency. Hume, Fox's Washington managing editor, got the nod because administration insiders like his style.

Bush's address is to strike a defiant note about his decision to attack Iraq even though the Security Council refused to back the war.

"I will make it clear that I made the right decision and the others that joined us made the right decision," he said. "The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein." Bush said he would remind member nations of the "serious consequences" promised in Resolution 1441, passed by the Security Council in November, if Iraq did not disarm. "At least somebody stood up and said this is a definition of serious consequences," he said.

France and Germany insisted anew over the weekend that the United Nations should replace the United States as manager of Iraq's political transition until Iraqis take over. In negotiations over the resolution, administration officials have been looking for a way to give the United Nations more say in Iraq's political process while retaining U.S. control of the occupation.

"I do think it would be helpful to get the United Nations in to help write a constitution. I mean, they're good at that," Bush told Fox News in an Oval Office interview to be aired tonight. "Or, perhaps when an election starts, they'll oversee the election. That would be deemed a larger role."

Congressional negotiators are weighing House and Senate proposals to include dozens of tax breaks for industries in pending energy legislation, even though they could add as much as $19 billion to the federal budget deficit in the next decade.

[edit]

Under a Senate-supported proposal to require gasoline refiners to increase their use of corn-based ethanol fuel in their blends, the government stands to lose as much as $2.5 billion a year in gasoline excise taxes. Because gasoline made with ethanol gets a 5.3 cents-a-gallon tax subsidy, increasing ethanol's share of the gasoline market would reduce receipts from the federal tax.

This year, manufacturers are to produce more than 1 million "flexible-fuel" cars and trucks that can run on either gasoline or E85, a mixture of 15 percent gas and 85 percent ethanol, which is derived from grain and releases fewer greenhouse gases than petroleum when it burns.

There were no such vehicles in 1988 and about 800,000 last year. In 2004 automakers plan to build nearly 1.8 million flexible-fuel vehicles -- in one stroke nearly doubling the number of such cars on the road, which now stands at 2 million, according to the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition.

The trouble is, there is almost no place for them to fill up with E85, so virtually all just run on gasoline. Fewer than 150 of the roughly 176,000 gas stations nationwide offer the ethanol-based fuel, the coalition and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said.

But auto manufacturers get credits toward meeting federal fuel-efficiency standards for every ethanol-friendly car or truck they build, regardless of whether the vehicle's owner actually uses the alternative fuel. The government requires automakers to sell cars that get an average of 27.5 miles per gallon and light trucks that average 20.7 mpg, and the flexible-fuel credit allows manufacturers to fall short of those numbers by as much as 1.2 mpg.

That means motorists could wind up using 20 million to 56 million more barrels of oil each year because of the credits for the unused ethanol, according to figures from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.