John McCain told Americans last night that if elected, "We're going to stop sending $700 billion a year to countries that don't like us very much." Sounds like a plan, right?

McCain cited the oft-repeated claim, touted by wind-power-magnate T. Boone Pickens, that we send $700 billion to other countries due to foreign oil imports. Though many media outlets have regurgitated this figure, there seem to be bipartisan problems in this estimate.

According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the real value of crude oil imports in 2007 was just a fraction of that, about $205 billion (closer to $250 billion when you throw in other petroleum products).

And where is it going? Not all the oil money is being funneled to places the government perceives as hostile.

In the campaign media circus, the stream of gossip, leaks, gotchas and gaffes can be dizzying. Now Sarah Palin has thrown everything off balance in a storm of public scrutiny.

Is she a token? An everywoman? A wonderwoman? A true maverick or another shrewd peddler of politics as usual? Does it matter? All we know is that we want to know more.

And the kind of ravenous curiosity Palin has attracted--usually reserved for Paris Hilton types--also gives her political backers something to rally around. Republicans are painting media criticism of Palin as unfair and sexist; others say the McCain campaign is simply playing victim to stoke public sympathy and deflect valid inquiries.

At the Republican National Convention last night, Mike Huckabee declared that negative publicity has helped fire up the base:

“I’d like to thank the elite media for doing something that, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure could be done, and that’s unifying the Republican Party and all of America in support of Senator McCain and Governor Palin.

“The reporting of the past few days have proven tackier than a costume change at a Madonna concert.”

The men who want your vote this November both say they want to soothe pain at the pump by ramping up domestic energy production. But even without their help, and even with the onslaught of Hurricane Gustav, various other economic factors--including perhaps a shift in Americans' driving patterns--may already be creating a perfect storm in the oil market. Prices could finally be shifting in the direction that politicians have mostly just aspired to.

But that hasn’t stopped the current president from goading Congress to allow more domestic oil exploitation. At a White House briefing on Tuesday, President Bush used Gustav’s relatively light touch in the drill-spotted Gulf Coast to justify an expansion of offshore drilling:

“…this storm should not cause the members of Congress to say, well, we don't need to address our energy independence; it ought to cause the Congress to step up their need to address our dependence on foreign oil. And one place to do so is to give us a chance to explore in environmentally friendly ways on the Outer Continental Shelf."

Depends on what you mean by “friendly,” of course.

A longstanding congressional ban has held most of the Outer Continental Shelf off limits to drilling, but consumer frustrations have softened political attitudes toward the ban. A recent poll in California—the state that raised environmental awareness in 1969 after a devastating oil spill in Santa Barbara—indicates that a narrow majority of residents now favor more drilling.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have warmed to the prospect of a drilling expansion, with Obama supporting limited drilling as a stopgap measure, and McCain wanting to “drill more, drill now” to rein in fuel costs.

Could the Bush administration play Gustav, the storm now famous for not being Katrina, as the final push to break the political stalemate over drilling?

Got drugs? According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, "the average television viewer spends 100 minutes watching [pharmaceutical] advertising for every minute in a doctor’s office."

There's a roiling debate in the health-care world about whether the quality time the pharmaceuticals industry spends with us in our living rooms is a waste -- or even worse, hazardous to our health.

Previous research has drawn a connection between drug sales and consumer ads. But a new study suggests that direct-to-consumer advertising -- the charmingly vague, banally pleasant commercials promoting treatments for everything from erectile dysfunction to high cholestrol--may not be particularly good for anyone, not even the advertiser.

Many celebrated Labor Day just by taking a break from work, but some might recall a time long ago when the "workingmen's holiday" had a little more bite to it.

Union membership in America has declined steeply during the past three decades, and some economists attribute growing economic gaps to the attrition of organized labor. According to the Economic Policy Institute's report, the State of Working America 2008/2009:

"Unionized workers earn higher wages than comparable non-union workers and also are 18.3 percent more likely to have health insurance, 22.5 percent more likely to have pension coverage, and 3.2 percent more likely to have paid leave. The erosion of unionization (from 43.1 percent in 1978 to just 19.2 percent in 2005) can account for 65 percent of the 11.1 percentage-point growth of the blue-collar/white-collar wage gap among men over the 1978-2005 period."

Could making it easier for workers to unionize help take the edge off of their economic woes? Our Monday editorial looked at the Employee Free Choice Act as one initiative that could reduce barriers to unionizing. It would amend the current rules for establishing a union by requiring only that a majority of employees present authorization cards indicating that they want to unionize. The traditional unionizing process, a secret ballot, would still be available as an alternative. The Act would also impose new penalties on employers who try to block organizing efforts.

If the sea of about 84,000 spectators at Invesco Field at Mile High seemed like a lot to you last night, imagine how many arenas we could fill with a much less cheery crowd here in New York. About half a million workers across the state were stuck on the unemployment rolls as of July, according to a new report by the Fiscal Policy Institute.

Calling the joblessness problem “the other crisis in Albany,” the labor-friendly think tank reported yesterday:

The New York State unemployment rate was 5.2 percent in July, up from a low-point of 4.3 percent in 2006. Higher still is the rate of underemployment (8.1 percent in 2007, the latest data available), which includes people who are so discouraged that they have stopped looking for work, and workers who would like to work full time but can only find a part-time job.

The FPI analysis also found that New York workers' median hourly wage has been relatively stagnant since 2003, and dipped over the past year. Modest job growth did occur between 2003 and 2007, according to the report, but was “largely driven by debt and an unprecedented housing market bubble.”

Though Long Island is known as one of the state’s bastions of affluence, it ranked high among counties in terms of rising unemployment. From the first half of 2007 to the first half of 2008, average unemployment in Suffolk grew from about 29,900 to 36,700 (a 22.6 percent jump), and in Nassau from roughly 24,900 to 30,200 (21 percent). New York's overall average unemployment grew by around 13 percent; job losses have clustered in the finance, construction and retail sectors.

The trends signal a troubling change, but not a hopeless one, the institute says. The report urges Albany lawmakers to respond by reforming the state's unemployment insurance system (which currently doles out about $300 per week on average), to help families ride out the economic slump while softening the impact of eroding wages.

As the presidential candidates flex prospective muscle on foreign affairs, military escalation in Afghanistan has become a recurring campaign theme. The narrative that politicians are weaving suggests that in contrast to America's ugly entanglement in Iraq, Afghanistan is somehow the “right” war, because it would strike terrorist forces at their root.

Sen. Joe Biden's convention speech aimed to quell voter anxieties about national security by stressing Obama's wish to step up America's military presence in Afghanistan.

And a build-up is already on the horizon, as the military prepares to pump more than 12,000 new soldiers into its Afghanistan operations.

Yet the swelling of the U.S. military role is shadowed by continued violence, peaking with an especially lethal spasm last week: 90 civilians killed by a U.S.-led airstrike, as declared by the United Nations.

Meanwhile, in a parallel to diplomatic tensions in Iraq, Afghanistan is pressuring the United States to revise the skeletal regulations governing its military operations, in a push to avoid more destruction by foreign forces tasked with securing the region.

But Marine commandant Gen. James T. Conway still trumpeted the need for more troops in Afghanistan yesterday, hinting that the move would dovetail neatly with the recent move toward an Iraq military drawdown:

"Everyone seems to agree that additional forces are the ideal course of action for preventing a Taliban comeback, but just where they're going to come from is still up for discussion.”

Others want to see the discussion move beyond the premise of "more is better." Critics warn of another misguided, Iraq-like quagmire, and they say the problem is not where the war is being fought, but how and why.

In our editorial about military-related sites on Long Island, we talked about the Pentagon's track record of wriggling out of environmental responsibilities. Though the Army Corps of Engineers has taken positive steps to examine local sites for possible contamination, other communities have met daunting resistance in trying to get the military to clean up after itself.

The Washington Post reported in June on three military bases that the Environmental Protection Agency had flagged as contaminated with toxins—a potential threat to local water systems: Fort Meade in Maryland, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. The Department of Defense bucked the EPA’s orders, while also refusing to comply with requirements for remediating 12 other military sites on the Superfund list. In recent years, the Pentagon has also fought the EPA on safety standards for hazardous chemicals found to be prevalent in military areas.

Some lawmakers have blasted the Pentagon for shirking its duty to clean up some of the country’s most polluted spots.

Yet the military has also worked through official channels to skirt environmental mandates.

Conventions are a time-honored marketing tool; the point is to sell candidates. But a lot of the real business happens when influence peddlers get to work behind the scenes.

If you’re in the mood for some sliders and light conversation on FCC regulations or adjustable-rate mortgages, you could look into opportunities to schmooze with the political rainmakers swarming over the Mile-high City’s party zone.

(Slate has a handy checklist for ensuring that your lobbyist “reception” complies with the newly established ethics law.)

At the Capital Eye blog of the Center for Responsive Politics, Sheila Krumholz observes a shindig hosted by financial industry players, billed as an educational event.

“…the gathering at a saloon-style restaurant was an opportunity for the financial services industry to show members of Congress that it’s being responsible by looking out for consumers and educating them about personal finance. ‘Impacting Policy, Impacting People’ is the Roundtable’s slogan, and in this case it was clear the people the group wanted to 'impact' are lawmakers, just as it does in D.C. Banks, mortgage lenders and other industries in the financial sector fear that the mortgage meltdown will prompt a Democratic Congress (and a Democratic administration, if Barack Obama is elected) to impose additional regulations. …

”Over a buffet and open bar (since it was not yet noon, mimosas and bloody marys were flowing), a few lawmakers and about 50 to 75 lobbyists and association staff mingled not far from Pepsi Center (but far enough that two cab drivers and two police officers were unable to find or suggest a path to the event through downtown Denver’s many barricaded streets). There were plenty of unclaimed nametags at the check-in table.”

The blog crew at Party Time, a guide to convention socializing run by the Sunlight Foundation, crashed a soiree featuring palm-sized caesar salads (no full meals allowed, says Congress), and spied some political heavyweights, including Rep. Henry Waxman and Long Island's own Rep. Steve Israel, rubbing elbows with Medtronic and Bank of America operatives. There were also some conspicuous absences:

While the event clearly was more open than others I’ve tried to attend here at the Denver convention, what was also notable was who was not there. I didn’t see any representatives of public interest groups -- consumer, environmental, or otherwise. It was clearly a corporate-Congress-media type of event. It provided yet another chance for powerful folks to mingle with other powerful folks here in Denver this week.

There's no shortage of contradictions in the electorate: people want elite credentials along with blue-collar street cred, they want toughness without unpalatable anger, and with both major candidates honing in on "values," now the challenge is mixing faith and politics without diluting either.

The straddling of church and state is bound to stretch now that Sen. Joe Biden, a pro-choice Catholic, has jumped into the race.

But it's sometimes an awkward balancing act. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently lost faith points on Meet the Press, drawing harsh rebukes for suggesting that there has been longstanding debate over abortion within the Catholic Church.

Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl fired back:

"Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable."

But if church doctrine is holding firm, faith of a more political nature is flowing freely in Denver.

Over the past few weeks, about 457,000 people declined an exclusive offer for an expense-paid trip abroad. Nationwide, eight people did sign up for "Operation Scheduled Departure," the Department of Homeland Security's self-deportation pilot program. For others, though, the prospect of voluntarily abandoning their lives in America didn't seem worth the price of flying back on the government's dime.

Immigration authorities had hoped that the friendly approach would entice immigrants with outstanding deportation orders to just ship out, no questions asked.

Reform advocates predicted the initiative's failure, noting the vast numbers of undocumented immigrants who are firmly rooted in the economy and their communities. Groups like the National Immigration Forum say immigration policy should work within that reality, rather than continue to deny it in vain.

Yet the government is bouncing back from its folly by returning to kicking people out the old-fashioned way.

College drunkenness is as American as apple pie. What would those bright college years be without memories of keg stands, beer pong, Jell-O shots, cocktails of cola and Cold Duck... and the morning-after moment of reckoning, huddled over a toilet awash in a sea of crumpled aluminum.

But the flipside of all this fun is lethality. Widespread binge-drinking problems on college campuses have goaded college administrators to explore policies that might deter out-of-control alcohol consumption. Since alcohol binges often happen in tandem with underage drinking, some reform advocates say tweaking the age threshold could help rein in reckless drinking.

The Amethyst Initiative, a coalition of more than 100 higher-education administrators, is urging lawmakers to reconsider the legal drinking age of 21, arguing that the age limit has little effect on underage drinking and actually perpetuates destructive “clandestine” drinking.

Is an alcohol binge fueled by the surreptitious thrill of breaking the rules? And if drinking were not such a legally risky act, would young people be less inclined to go overboard? (We invite readers to comment below.)

While New York lawmakers haggle over a tax cap proposal to curb school spending, activists in Chicago are going to court to shake up the whole funding system.

The Chicago Urban League, a civil rights organization, has filed a lawsuit claiming that the Illinois school system's heavy reliance on local property taxes has led to funding inequities across districts and vast educational disparities.

(Schools in Illinois and New York, compared to many other states, place an especially heavy burden on local coffers.)

But unlike the debate now polarizing Albany, the Chicago case looks beyond the question of tax burdens and indicts entire funding structure as unjust on civil rights grounds.

Chicago Urban League President Cheryle R. Jackson said in a statement yesterday that the funding scheme violated the state constitution, and as a result:

“Our children, especially African Americans and Latinos, have been left behind because of poorly funded schools while their white counterparts in wealthy communities are thriving."

New York has had its share of court drama over school funding as well. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity fought for over a decade to challenge the state's school financing scheme, arguing that funding inequities prevented New York City students from receiving a "sound basic education." In the end, a state court ruled that City students' needs were being shortchanged by budget politics and set in motion a structural reform effort.

From rolling midwestern plains to the Manhattan skyline, wind energy has been marketed as a renewable goldmine. Still, as wind picks up momentum, politics and economic tensions are clouding the horizon for the rapidly commercializing energy source.

On Long Island, LIPA's plan to establish an offshore wind farm ran into various political and regulatory snares and finally collapsed when authorities found that it would cost far more than originally anticipated.

Meanwhile, a $2 billion wind-power investment upstate is meeting some resistance from Albany regulators, as it is tied to a sticky deal for a major utility takeover by a foreign company.

In some upstate communities, skeptical residents say wind energy firms are using insidious tactics to stake out land and score local deals with officials.

Is the wind boom becoming a bubble?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is drumming up controversy with a plan to tweak the rules for national security-related investigations. According to news reports, agents may soon gain greater leeway to pursue people based on suspicious characteristics, drawn from information like travel records or personal associations, as opposed to evidence of an actual crime.

The initiative folds into the bureau's effort to "harmonize" its investigative guidelines, melding its criminal law enforcement and new anti-terror roles. As Attorney General Michael Mukasey explained in a recent speech in Portland, Ore., the bureau wants to "shift its national security focus from investigating crimes after they occur to collecting the intelligence necessary to detect and prevent attacks before they occur."

Civil libertarians worry the planned changes will encourage guilt by association and racial or ethnic profiling--especially for the Muslim and Arab communities that have been targets of counter-terrorism probes. Members of Congress have called for a full public hearing on the changes before they are implemented.

On Saturday, the two presidential hopefuls had a heart-to-heart with pastor Rick Warren and a few million of their closest friends. The much-anticipated candidate forum at the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County, Calif. seemed a kind of respite from the ugly political minefield voters have been exposed to -- at least for an hour or two.

As we noted in Tuesday's editorial, morality was the undercurrent of the discussion, with a smattering of standard campaign issues (Warren is at the helm of a growing movement of evangelicals known for being more socially conscious than old-school hardliners).

Both Barack Obama and John McCain talked about their moral shortcomings with a combination of mild self-flagellation and policy talking points.

Both cited self-centeredness as a moral failure, with Obama reflecting on his youthful dalliance with drugs and alcohol and McCain mentioning his failed first marriage.

Both launched from a confessional tone to moderate stump mode, trumpeting the value of public service and social empathy.

The back-to-back discussions (Obama followed by McCain) offered a small window into their characters--providing a down-to-earth feel, in contrast to other images plastered over the campaign, of elitism, celebrity, even the messiah.

Yet, not surprisingly, following the televised cuddliness, the regularly scheduled political slugfest promptly resumed.

On the world stage, the brilliant performance of the Chinese women's gymnastics team has inspired awe--and a touch of doubt. As today's editorial page noted, their teeny frames have prompted suspicions of age doctoring.

The media is swirling with reports that some girls may be under age 16 — too young to compete in the Olympics--while state press reports seem to have been suspiciously scrubbed, possibly in an Orwellian effort to erase any trace of scandal.

Some commentators seem refreshed that the issue has finally given some bite to what they see as a sanitized Olympics love-fest — the "Kumbaya games."

Harvey Araton of the New York Times questioned why there was not more talk of Pixie-gate in the media circus:

"...why do I get the feeling that if these Olympics were happening in Chicago or Los Angeles, the story would by now be a serious cable television cause célèbre?

"Larry King would be hosting the stricken parents of victimized Americans. Hannity would be chiding Colmes about Communist child abusers. Lou Dobbs would be demanding the borders be closed to all Chinese gymnasts under 80 pounds....

"When in North America, do as the North Americans do — overreact. When in China, overlook.

"For better or worse, these are the shrug-and-don’t-tell Olympics, undoubtedly because it would be considered impolitic to embarrass the Chinese after they went to such great expense to throw the world this lavish party."

Is the American media giving its Olympic hosts a free pass?

From the perspective of many Chinese, Western outlets are in fact running a smear campaign to blemish China's Olympic moment. But China can't deny that it's tossed plenty of riddles at quizzical spectators.

Two curious trends stand out in the latest Census Bureau population report: We’re getting older and more foreign.

The retirement age group (age 65 and over) will rise from 13 to 20 percent of the population. Meanwhile, “net international migration” will rise steadily: the annual rate of immigration will grow from an estimated 1.3 million to more than 2 million between 2010 and 2050.

Add all that together and what do you get?

Maybe a doomsday scenario, if you're an advocate for tighter restrictions on immigration. Restrictionists might argue that a growing burden on social security will aggravate the supposed strain that immigrants impose on social programs.

But if you look carefully at how these two forces—aging and immigration—interact, a different narrative emerges. As taxpayers and workers, immigrants contribute to Social Security and this could strengthen the system's ability to absorb the aging population.

It’s a neat counterpoint to the arguments aired by anti-immigrant groups.

The state Department of Labor's most recent press release shows an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent in July--a decrease from the previous month, but a marked increase from a year ago. Job losses this year have totalled 20,200. On Long Island, while there was some nonfarm job growth, unemployment rose from 4.7 to 5 percent from June to July.

Still, things could be worse. While unemployment declined slightly in New York from June to July, nationwide, unemployment rose from 5.5 to 5.7 percent over the same period.

Before drawing any conclusions, it's worth parsing how politics might color the data. The New York Times notes that the state's report, which focuses on job losses over the past few months, "accentuated the negative" rather than "trumpeting the decline in joblessness."

Some question whether the state's current economic and fiscal issues are as dismal or as urgent as this report and the Governor's recent call to action in Albany suggest. The Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, wonders if the Governor might be putting a negative spin on the job data to justify fiscal tightening--as he prepares to push budget cut proposals in next week's special legislative session.

The story of Aafia Siddiqui reads like a good mystery novel: a young Pakistani woman gets swept up in a national-security probe, moves to her homeland, abruptly disappears, suddenly resurfaces five years later in Afghanistan, and then lands in a New York courtroom, wounded and frail, accused of trying to kill U.S. soldiers.

The really disturbing part is that it’s not fiction, and even more strangely, after so many years, these facts are virtually all the public knows of the neuroscientist and mother of three, despite the FBI's supposedly relentless pursuit.

U.S. authorities say they started tracking Siddiqui and her husband several years ago, intrigued by some odd military-type equipment purchases. In 2003, terror suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed implicated her as an al-Qaida operative, and she vanished shortly afterward.

Advocates say the evidence (including suspicious materials found in her handbag) is rigged, and that Siddiqui is a victim of a global anti-terror dragnet. Her defenders also question the government’s allegations that the tiny woman grabbed an officer’s rifle and “fired it at officers and employees of the FBI and the United States armed services.”

Quick survey: opinion polling is the a) best, b) worst, thing ever to happen to American politics.

Pollsters have attained god-like status with their powers of gauging the public's psyche, yet trying to divine any real insight from polls tends to just make politicians, media outlets, and voters more confused about what people really think.

Yesterday on Washington Monthly’s Political Animal, David Moore, a former Gallup opinion maestro who just published a tell-all book about his craft, took the polling-political-industrial complex to task.

He parsed an interesting quirk in the way people respond to poll questions: People might say they favor one thing, but not actually give a hoot about whether their opinions are reflected in public policy. One person may take a "permissive" position, meaning they “would not be upset if the government did the opposite of what they just said they preferred.” Another might hold a “directive” opinion—strong enough to lead them to take action if the government went against their position, “even if only by eventually voting against political leaders who supported it.”

Pollsters tend not to bother with such nuance, however.

With the whole state budget headed for a crash diet in next week's legislative session, health care for the poor has once again landed on the table.

Paterson’s proposed cuts would slice the growth in Medicaid spending by more than $500 million for the rest of this fiscal year, followed by about $1 billion in 2009-2010. The proposal would target funding for hospitals, nursing homes and medications, as well as public programs like Family Health Plus.

No one would deny that Medicaid costs a lot; the state spends more per person on Medicaid than many other states, and the governor estimates that spending increases will account for about one quarter of the budget shortfall for the 2009-10 fiscal year. But critics argue that there are better ways for Albany to save money than scrimping on health care for low-income people.

His White House tenure may be ebbing, but President Bush couldn't resist taking one final jab at environmental protections he has long bristled against.

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne wants to tweak the Endangered Species Act, the federal law that stands between many animals and total annhilation. The White House proposed "common-sense modifications" would basically free federal agencies of longstanding oversight procedures when they take actions that might harm endangered species.

Under existing ESA regulations, agencies must consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to provide scientific review and oversight of wildlife protection measures. The Interior Department argues that eliminating this layer of review would "reduce the number of unnecessary consultations" and would result in "a process that is less time-consuming and a more effective use of our resources.”

From an ecological standpoint, when it comes to protecting species on the verge of being wiped off the face of the planet, you might wonder what would be a more effective use of public resources besides ensuring that the soundest technology and science are employed in the effort. Well, one thing the administration seems to spend a lot of time and resources on these days is preventing government from taking decisive action to stem climate change.

There's a lot of talk about the economic "costs" and "benefits" of immigrants--from the job market, to the black market, to the political economy of Capitol Hill.

Federal authorities have touted aggressive raids as a way to control illegal immigration and choke off undocumented workers' economic base. But things get complicated when, as we've seen here on Long Island and other communities, people caught up in these sweeps turn out to have lives, families, and increasingly, networks of advocates willing to defend the role they have carved out for themselves in their communities.

To counter the vast resources the government poured into its crackdowns, activists are pushing back by supporting undocumented detainees' legal battles. Today, the National Immigrant Bond Fund launched a fund drive with the backing of a wealthy financier and the New York-based Public Interest Projects, along with a grassroots push from Casa De Maryland, an organization that has aided workers detained in a recent raid in Annapolis. The AP reports:

"Illegal immigrants arrested in raids who do not have any outstanding criminal violations can apply for financial assistance. Churches, legal organizations or groups such as Casa help facilitate their requests. The fund provides half the bail money and immigrants must pony up the rest."

On Sunday, Newsday looked at wide disparities among Long Island's libraries. While some branches sink funds into slick consultants and posh decor, others strive humbly just to keep their shelves stocked. Echoing the school funding debate, it looks like a typical story of Long Island's fiscal peculiarities and looming public wariness of government lard.

But does it make a difference whether your local library is shelling out for an art installation in the lobby rather than, say, the full Harry Potter collection? Are libraries becoming another suburban boondoggle?

Advocates are quick to point out that as a public trust, libraries may be playing a more vital role in the community than ever, in spite, or because, of changes in the way people consume information.

If you're at the office reading this with 15 Google windows open and your Blackberry a-twitter, libraries may seem like a fossil of the literary Stone Age. But in fact, as personal interactive media have overtaken print, library use has intensified. According to the American Library Association's research, "the number of visits to public libraries in the United States increased 61 percent between 1994 and 2004," and "Overall circulation at public libraries in the U.S. rose by 28 percent during the decade, partly driven by significant growth in circulation of children's materials, which grew by 44 percent." Libraries apparently still manage to draw young people even as parents lament the decline of book reading.

A modest effort to push past the anti-Muslim sentiment now oozing across the campaign trail has now apparently fallen prey to it.

Mazen Asbahi, a Chicago-based corporate lawyer recently appointed as the Obama campaign's national coordinator for Muslim American affairs, just resigned amid tensions over his tenuous link to a foundation supposedly tied to an alleged fundamentalist Islamic organization. The mad syllogism, spurred by the conservative blogosphere and a probe by the Wall Street Journal, can be traced to a cryptic, subscription-only newsletter called Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report (which seems to be a resource for groups that track supposedly radical Islamic organizations).

Evidently, Asbahi served briefly on the board of the Allied Assets Advisors Fund years ago and then resigned when he "became aware of public allegations against another member of the board." The board also included Jamal Said, an imam tied to a mosque that those "watchdog" groups have accused of fundamentalism.

Ironically, Asbahi's appointment to the Obama camp was intended to defuse some the prevailing anti-Muslim bias and to cut through general ignorance about both Obama's religious background and Islam in general.

Seven years after the anthrax attacks of 2001 sent a spasm of panic throughout the country and may have helped pave the political path toward the Iraq war... the chill of the threat still lingers, alongside mounting questions about the surrounding government investigation.

Today, a federal district court unsealed key documents in the case against Bruce Ivins, the government scientist who killed himself after the FBI began closing in on him as a suspect. But the documents tracing the FBI's investigation aren't likely to dampen the pointed skepticism that has surfaced in both the mainstream media and the blogosphere.

On today's editorial page, we comment on the value of inclusive programs for students with disabilities. In today's news, meanwhile, a local debate reveals one challenge in making special education work for children and families: the question of what to call their diplomas.

The state Board of Regents amended its standards years ago to enable most students with disabilities to qualify for regular high school diplomas. But for students with severe disabilities, special diplomas are granted under Individualized Education Plans. IEPs are personalized programs created through collaboration between families and teachers, along with other professionals.

Following an unprecedented address to TV audiences last week, Gov. David Paterson barely had time to remove his lapel microphone before Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was on the radio, questioning whether the state budget is actually in crisis. Silver said, "Let's sit around for a few more weeks and analyze a little more data before we act precipitously."

Since then, the question Paterson had hoped to place front and center -- what to cut and by how much -- has morphed into a debate over how bad the emergency really is. A story today in the New York Times says governors have hit the crisis button frequently in the past