Category: Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
House Rescues National Do-Not-Call at Last Minute
WASHINGTON – Two days after a federal judge killed a national do-not-call list that would shield more than a quarter million New Hampshire residents from pesky telemarketers, Congress rushed into action Thursday with legislation to activate the popular list.
With overwhelming bipartisan support and uncharacteristic speed, the House passed a bill that would make an end-run around Tuesday’s federal district court ruling and allow the Federal Trade Commission to launch the list next week as planned. Millions of Americans have put their phone numbers on the list intended to block unwanted telemarketing calls. The Senate approved the bill later Thursday, 95-0.
“Twenty-four hours ago we found out about the problem, and today we’re attempting to solve it,” said U.S. Congressman Charlie Bass, R-NH, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Bass co-sponsored both the bill that the House passed, 412-8, Thursday and the one the court said did not accomplish what Bass and others said it did.
U.S. District Court Judge Lee R. West ruled that a law enacted early this year did not grant the Federal Trade Commission power to operate a do-not-call list. He said Congress years ago had granted such authority to the Federal Communications Commission, which chose not to create a list.
West’s decision, released Wednesday, at least temporarily freed telemarketers to call the 50 million phone numbers registered on the list since June. The law was scheduled to take effect Oct. 1, with telemarketers facing fines as high as $11,000 for each call to a listed number.
The FTC reported that 274, 893 New Hampshire phone numbers were registered to the list as of Sept. 16.
U.S. Congressman Jeb Bradley, R-NH, said the national do-not-call list has added significance in New Hampshire because the Granite State is one of 24 without a state registry.
“People should not be denied because of a technicality the ability to voluntarily restrict calls that are coming in at dinner time or maybe bedtime,” Bradley said. “I believe the bill we voted for in February gave [the FTC] authority. We’re correcting that right now — if in fact there was even a problem.”
New Hampshire officials had planned to adopt the federal list, compiled by the FTC, for use in its own, new do-not-call registry. The court decision left unclear whether that would be possible.
“The fly in the ointment remains: what is the status of the actual list,” said Kristin Spath, head of the Consumer Protection Bureau in the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office.
The FTC announced Wednesday it would appeal the court’s decision, but lawmakers said they hoped President Bush would quickly sign a new law allowing the list to launch on time next week.
Bass said he was confident the court ruling would be overturned, but added that the legislation passed Thursday “essentially would negate the need for completing the appeal.” He said his Concord office was flooded with calls from angry residents after the court’s decision was made public.
House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Billy Tauzin, R-La., introduced the new bill late Wednesday and shepherded it through the House with a touch of humor. Fighting back laughter during a brief, mostly one-sided debate, Tauzin said, “We should call it the ‘This time we really mean it’ bill.”
Some observers were stunned by the speed with which Congress reacted on the issue.
“I’ve never seen the house move so quickly on anything like this,” said Jeff Kramer, a lobbyist with the AARP, the powerful senior citizens’ lobby and one of the registry’s fiercest advocates.
An FTC spokeswoman declined to comment on the legislation Thursday. Officials from the Direct Marketing Association, which represented telemarketers in the federal suit, did not return calls for comment.
Sununu: Funding Iraqi Infrastructure Vital to U.S. Security
WASHINGTON - New Hampshire Sen. John E. Sununu on Wednesday rejected Democratic maneuvers to divide and possibly reduce President Bush's request for $87 billion more for military and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sununu echoed L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority now running Iraq, who told Congress that money to rebuild the country should remain linked to funds for military operations there. American security is tied to successfully rehabilitating the war-torn nation, said Sununu, who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"Whether the funding for the Provisional Authority is dealing with a police force or infrastructure or for the military forces, all of them directly affect the security of the area and our national security," Sununu said after Bremer completed three hours of testimony before the committee on Wednesday.
Bremer encouraged committee members to support all aspects of Bush's $87 billion budget proposal, saying that "every part depends on every other part."
Leading Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota have grown increasingly critical of the request and have said the $20.3 billion for reconstruction should be split from the more than $66 billion for military operations.
Splitting the request would make it easier for Democrats to chip away at money intended for rebuilding Iraq while avoiding the politically risky position of depriving U.S. service men and woman of the means to defend themselves. Many Democrats have said they have a tough time rationalizing spending billions to rebuild Iraq when many domestic programs, such as education, are strapped for cash.
A report released Tuesday by Democrats on the House Budget Committee estimated that the costs of reconstruction and military operations in Iraq could reach $418 billion over the next decade. At the same time, conservative Republicans have threatened to kill a plan to provide prescription drug benefits to senior citizens on Medicare if the cost exceeds $400 billion over the same period.
"We can't even build our own roads and transit systems," Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., told Bremer during the hearing.
"How do we explain those inequalities to our constituencies?" Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., asked a panel of foreign policy experts who testified before the Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.
But Bremer insisted the reconstruction money is essential.
"We cannot simply pat the Iraqis on the back, tell them they are lucky to be rid of Saddam [Hussein] and then ask them to go find their place in the global market - to compete without the tools for competition," Bremer told the committee during its second day of hearings.
Sununu, a former engineer who visited Iraq last month, said the reconstruction money is crucial to restoring the country's infrastructure and reducing America's presence there.
"We've got to rebuild and re-establish electricity and the energy grid and the oil infrastructure because, in the long run, that will determine whether it's an economically stable and viable country," Sununu said. "And if it's not economically stable, then it won't be politically stable. And if it's not politically stable, then our national security won't be protected as it should be."
Sununu also dismissed Democratic proposals to provide reconstruction money in the form of a loan that Iraq would repay once its economy had regained its footing. Bremer said Iraq's international debt reached $200 billion under Hussein's regime, an amount Sununu said should be largely forgiven.
"I don't think it's realistic to press a new loan on a government that's effectively been bankrupted by its previous leader," Sununu said. "This is also money that we're putting forward because it's in our national security interest to do so. If we start trying to complicate matters by setting up a loan agreement and repayment schedules, I think we will only set ourselves up for disappointment and frustration."
Inside The Pentagon, A Concord Native Defends The Country
WASHINGTON - Every morning - whether morning finds him in his simple office deep within the Pentagon or in some distant foreign capital - William J. Luti asks himself the same question: "What do we do today to protect our citizens?"
Luti, 49, taking a rare break from his crisis-prone world of national defense planning, says this matter-of-factly.
As deputy Defense undersecretary for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, the Concord-native finds himself in perhaps a more crisis-prone position than he bargained for when he took the job just three weeks before Sept. 11, 2001. Luti is responsible for monitoring and recommending American defense policy toward 27 hotbed countries from Morocco to India, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
In the past two years he's found protecting Americans has become increasingly harder to do.
"It's sort of like tectonic plates," he said is a recent interview, framed by the tremendous world map on the rear wall of his office. "When they move an inch, what do you get? An earthquake.
"Well, Sept. 11 was a tectonic movement of six inches," he said, fresh from briefing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan.
Luti was in Cairo the day terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and left an ugly gash not far from his office in the Pentagon. In the two years since, Luti, who grew up on Lyndon Street in Concord and graduated from Bishop Brady High School, has made almost a dozen trips to the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. He meets with his counterparts among America's allies in the region and works with them, he says, to crush the threat of global terrorism that has "metastasized around the world."
When he took the job, Luti said he imagined tackling issues like the status of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, missile defense and America's continued support of Saudi Arabia. But the focus quickly changed when "we knew we had a fight on our hands," he said.
"Before Sept. 11, no one ever imagined that radical thugs could hijack a plane, crash it into a building and kill 3,000 Americans in less than an hour," he said. "It hasn't been the same since."
Much of Luti's time is spent devising strategies to prevent dictators like Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and to support the moderate faction in the war that he says is currently raging within Islam.
If he and his colleagues fail, "what happened to us on Sept. 11 would pale in comparison," he said.
But having spent nearly 27 years in the Navy as pilot and ship commander, Luti knows that making policy and executing it are separate and equally difficult tasks.
After graduating from The Citadel with a bachelor's degree in history, Luti, inspired by his father's service in World War II, entered the Navy as an officer. He became a decorated pilot, logging more than 3,000 flight hours off aircraft carriers in the Middle East and Balkans, including during Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
During his military career, Luti commanded a squadron of EA-6B Prowlers armed to electronically jam the radar of enemy missile sites, clearing safe passage for U.S. bombers. He also commanded the amphibious assault ship USS Guam and was named commander of an amphibious ready group.
As he rose to the rank of Captain and continued his education, Luti began to specialize in policy. He received a master's degree in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College, and a master's in law and diplomacy and a doctorate in international relations from Tufts University.
Before joining the Defense Department, Luti received a number of policy-related assignments at Navy think tanks. He spent the first seven months of the Bush administration as a special adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs, specializing in the Middle East. Through his work as a military liason to the think tanks, Luti came to know Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who approached him when the Defense Department position opened.
"One thing led to another, and one day I woke up and I'd served twenty-six and a half years in the Navy," said Luti, who keeps reminders of his service, a framed photo of the Guam and a scale model of a Prowler, in his office. The decision to retire from the Navy was a difficult one, but "it was an opportunity I couldn't pass up," he said. "I had always wanted to work in a republican administration in national security."
Luti maintained a New Hampshire address throughout his military career, only recently changing it to Virginia, where he now lives with his wife and family.
"New Hampshire is such a natural wonderland," he said, recalling how he used to run the eight-mile Mount Washington road race every year in high school and the time he spent skiing, hiking and swimming around Echo and Profile Lakes. "I long for the day I can go back."
His parents and his brother still live in Concord and Alton.
But for now at least, his job demands his time elsewhere. He just returned from yet another trip, this time with Rumsfeld, to Iraq, where he said contrary to many media reports, signs of vitality and reconstruction are visible everywhere.
While traveling down the main road in Karbala, Shia Muslims' holiest city, Luti said his party was greeted by shouts in English of "Bush is Good!" from grateful Iraqis.
"[Critics] said they would never let us into the holiest cities, and not only did they let us in, but they welcomed us," he said.
These trips, he said, though draining, are essential to America's new active, post-Sept. 11 defense strategy.
"You can no longer wait until you can see the whites of Mohamed Atta's eyes," he said of the alleged leader of the Sept. 11 plane hijackers.
"We've gone on the offensive." He added later, "It's long hours, but my family understands - it's wartime."
As Funds Dwindle, NH Toxic Waste Neighbors Fears Being Left to Pick up the Tab
WASHINGTON - The federal Superfund,, which for 20 years financed the cleanup of the worst toxic waste dumps in the country, will be flat broke by the end of the month, according to a recent report by congressional watchdogs, leaving uncertain the future of 18 poisonous sites in New Hampshire communities.
While Congress is on track to completely fund the program in the fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1 by other means, lawmakers, government officials, environmental advocates and the sites' neighbors disagree about whether the trust fund's bankruptcy will slow or even end cleanups in New Hampshire.
If the cleanup work continues, it now will be financed by taxpayers. When Congress created the Superfund in 1980, it designed the law to force polluting industries to finance the cleanup of their own waste.
"I don't think anybody who's paying taxes in this country should be paying for what somebody else did on purpose - and that's the operative word, on purpose," said Gerard Lemay, 57, an independent air-conditioning repairman from Nashua, who for 20 years has lived on Gilson Road a half-mile from one of the nation's first Superfund sites.
The Superfund was established in response to several environmental disasters, particularly at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, that sickened nearby residents in 1978. It was designed to bankroll the cleanup of the most severely polluted sites - known as the National Priority List - for which no polluters responsible for creating the problem could be found or forced to foot the bill.
For 15 years, a series of taxes on the chemical industry and on corporations in general financed the trust fund. The concept of taxing the chemical industry was simple: the polluter pays.
But in 1995, Congress allowed the taxes to expire amid fierce lobbying by the chemical industry. Since then, Congress voted down attempts to reinstate the tax, arguing that too much of the money went to litigation rather than cleanup.
For the past eight years, the Superfund continued to operate on the $3.6 billion balance left in its account in 1995 and additional money appropriated by Congress. But the trust fund's reserves will dwindle to zero by Sept. 30, the end of the current fiscal year, according to a report released this month by the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigative arm.
The Superfund will rely solely on the largess of Congress, raising concerns that cleanup efforts may languish or die at a time of war and record deficits and that thousands of New Hampshire residents will remain at risk.
"Eighty-seven billion we're giving to Iraq áwhen we can't even clean up our own hazardous waste sites," said Nashua Alderman Marc Plamondon, who has fought to get the Mohawk Tannery site in Nashua on the priority list. Formerly operated by Granite State Leathers, the 30-acre site on the Nashua River's floodplain - and adjacent to a children's bicycle trail -- is contaminated with chemical sludge, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Plamondon said he's not sure Superfund is the answer anymore.
"We could list it, but we're looking for other options because we know there's no money," Plamondon said. "If we do list it, then it falls into the black hole of Superfund sitesá and everybody just walks away and the EPA sits there waiting for money."
He added, "The sense of the general population is a sense of utter frustration and helplessness."
There are currently 1,233 sites from across the country on the National Priority List, including the 18 in New Hampshire. More than 200 additional sites nationwide - but none in New Hampshire -- have been removed from the list because they were cleaned up sometime in the last 20 years.
"Communities that have Superfund sites in them will have to wait, period," said Catherine Corkery, an organizer for the New Hampshire chapter of the Sierra Club, based in Concord. "Now, New Hampshire is left holding the toxic bag."
The Bush administration, Corkery says, has made its priorities clear by becoming the first to openly oppose the collection or reinstatement of the taxes on polluters. The result, she said, is slower clean-ups, reluctance on the part of the EPA to add more sites to the list and a shifting of costs from polluters to taxpayers.
But EPA officials and New Hampshire legislators contend the cleanup effort has not been hurt for lack of a tax. EPA spokesman Dave Ryan said the Superfund trust fund is "not relevant and that the idea of a "polluter pays" system is and always has been a myth because corporations simply passed the tax along in the form of higher prices.
Ryan argued that since Congress appears prepared to give the Superfund slightly more money for next year than it did this year - a total of nearly $1.3 billion - the fact that the money is not coming from the trust fund is a "non-issue."
"As far as we see it, we don't need it," Ryan said of the trust fund. "All that matters is how much Congress is going to give us."
Ryan added that EPA statistics show polluters pay directly for cleanup at 70 percent of all Superfund sites. The trust fund finances the remaining 30 percent because the polluters responsible either could not or would not pay.
But a prominent public advocacy group says those statistics are deceptive. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an independent watchdog organization, reported recently that the Superfund's cleanup progress has slowed as the majority of the costs have shifted to taxpayers. The report said taxpayers financed 79 percent of the cost of toxic cleanup this year, up from 18 percent in 1995. That number will reach 100 percent once the trust fund is empty at month's end.
The report, based on EPA statistics and an independent review that the EPA commissioned, also shows that the number of sites cleaned up every year has dropped from an average of 87 in the late 1990s, to an average of 45 since President Bush took office in 2001. While the administration has attributed the drop-off as a sign that the EPA is undertaking more complex, time-consuming cleanup operations, U.S.PIRG blames funding shortfalls.
"It's a policy decision by the EPA not to care where the funding is coming from," said Julie Wolk, U.S.PIRG's environmental health advocate and the report's author. But she said the source of money makes a big difference. "Having a surplus in the fund actually gives the EPA the ability to crack down on these polluters and say, 'You'd better go in and clean up that site or we're going to go in and charge you,' " Wolk added. The Superfund statute allows the EPA to recoup as much as three times the cleanup costs plus fines from polluters that refuse to cooperate.
The report lists two of New Hampshire's 18 Superfund sites that received either no or partial funding in 2002 and 2003, and projects that as many as eight current and proposed New Hampshire sites could be affected by future funding shortfalls.
Bradley said he's willing to consider reinstating the taxes "provided there is legal reform." He said too much of the fund's money goes toward "endless litigation" over liability.
In the meantime, Bradley said, "the important thing to take away is that there has been money appropriated" for the Superfund to continue its cleanups after this year.
Bradley conceded that tighter funding could lead to a "stalling of progress" on sites that no longer pose a direct threat to human health but still are far from clean - such as the one on Gilson Road. The EPA's estimates at least 1,300 drums of "chemical sludges" were illegally dumped on that site, formerly a sand pit whose owner charged manufacturers to dispose of hazardous waste there.
U.S. Congressman Charles Bass, R-NH, said he would support reinstating the taxes provided they're accompanied by reform.
But Bass, who sits on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials, said that given the other major issues before Congress, such as war and Medicare reform, he's "not even confident" the Superfund could be addressed in the next year.
Neither Bradley nor Bass co-sponsored a bill introduced early this year that would have reinstated the Superfund taxes, though both voted in favor of a failed amendment to increase Superfund funding by $115 million next year.
New Hampshire Sens. Judd Gregg and John E. Sununu, both Republicans, this year voted against an amendment to reinstate the taxes.
Gregg said in a statement that the Superfund remains "extremely important," though bogged down by lawsuits. He vowed to continue to make sure New Hampshire communities receive Superfund money if they need it.
"Real reforms are needed in order to improve cleanup and cost-effectiveness," Gregg said. "We must ensure that the Superfund is adequately funded and explore ways to ensure that the funds are used effectively."
Sununu said in a statement that he supports a comprehensive reform of the program and pointed out that Congress has appropriated more than $3.8 billion to help cleanup hazardous waste sites in the last three years.
But for Prudy Piechota, who like Mr. Lemay has lived more than two decades near the Gilson Road site in Nashua, using taxpayer money to clean Superfund sites is outrageous.
"The reason [the] Superfund was established was because corporations were doing the wrong thing at the wrong time," said Piechota, 55. In the early 1980s, Piechota led the fight to bring the EPA to Gilson Road and force polluters to pay cleanup costs, a fight that several neighbors said tore the community apart and escalated to threats and violence.
"All those people who died, all those people who got sick, and now who are they going to tax? Shame on them!" she said. "I'm just a housewifeá but I know enough that when I sweep dirt under the carpet, I have to go back and clean it later."
Overtime Amendment Sails in Senate Despite NH Opposition
WASHINGTON - Despite impassioned opposition from New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, the Senate Wednesday rejected a Bush administration plan that Gregg argued would entitle 1.3 million more lower-income Americans to overtime pay.
The defeat came in response to arguments by Democrats and organized labor that the proposed changes would strip millions of white-collar workers of their overtime eligibility.
"It's unfortunate that these hardworking Americans will be left out," Gregg said in a statement shortly after the vote Wednesday morning. He said the vote amounted to congressional interference in the regulatory process and was both "heavy handed" and "premature."
The proposed changes would require employers to pay overtime - at the rate of time-and-a-half - to workers who earn less than $22,100 a year, up from the current $8,060 a year. A Democratic amendment passed Wednesday would not prevent the administration from raising that income level, but it would stop President Bush from eliminating higher-income workers from overtime rules.
Democrats say Bush's proposal, which would tighten rules for receiving overtime, could revoke the eligibility of as many as 8 million white-collar workers.
In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday, Gregg panned that assessment, issued by a Washington economic policy think tank, as arbitrary and "extraordinarily suspect." He said the number of workers who would lose eligibility was more accurately pegged by an independent analysis obtained by the Department of Labor at 600,000 to 700,000.
The senator argued that the trade-off was worthwhile because the half-million newly eligible workers would be those at the lower end of the pay scale.
But more important, Gregg said, any congressional attempt to halt the regulatory process is "a serious overreaching" since the proposed revisions were still under review, citing an estimated 80,000 public comments the Labor Department has yet to consider. As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee, Gregg has emerged as one of the amendment's leading opponents.
Sen. John E. Sununu, R-NH, also voted against the amendment, which Democrats had tacked onto a major social services spending bill.
"Outdated regulations do not serve today's modern workplace, industry or employees," Sununu said in a statement. The initial overtime rules were adopted in 1938 and have not been updated in 30 years.
At least one New Hampshire labor advocate was dismayed by the two Senators' votes, calling them "absolutely a step in the wrong direction."
"We are disappointed with both Senators Gregg and Sununu," said Mark Mackenzie, president of NH AFL-CIO, a coordinating council for all AFL-CIO affiliated unions in the Granite State. "I think they're clearly out of step with what the American people are saying."
Although he didn't know how many New Hampshire workers might have been affected by the changes, Mackenzie said his organization sent 75,000 pieces of opposition mail to senators from across the country. And while he conceded that raising the minimum salary requirement was long overdue, Mackenzie said that if the income levels had been phased in gradually, such drastic changes would not be necessary.
Workers "communicated from across the country that this was a bad idea," he said. "All of the people they included at the bottom end, they took out of the top end."
The House rejected a similar amendment in July. President Bush has threatened to veto any bill that blocks the proposed changes, leaving the future of the Senate amendment uncertain.
"I think there is going to be an awful lot of pressure at this point," Mackenzie said. "We're gearing up for the next phase of this thing, and my hope is that it will hold."
War Spending Won’t Bog Down Economy, NH Lawmaker’s Say
WASHINGTON - New Hampshire lawmakers Tuesday vowed to support President Bush's request for $87 billion more for war and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, insisting the high price tag would not slow economic recovery at home.
But the Republican Congress members said Bush, who announced his request in a nationally televised address Sunday night, will have to spell out where the money is going and how long it will take to achieve his goal of a stable and peaceful Iraq.
"I fully expect to support the President's request," said U.S. Congressman Jeb Bradley, R-NH. But, he added, "Certainly, I, like other members of Congress, am going to want to see all the details."
Lawmakers said they want the President to answer a number of questions, including how he spent the first $79 billion Congress approved for the war on terrorism, how long it will be before an Iraqi constitution and representative government are established, and when export sales of Iraqi oil will begin to substantially offset the reconstruction costs.
"On a bipartisan basis, I expect that this is going to pass," Bradley said. "I think there are going to be hard questions, and that's appropriate, but I think that most Americans believe that we've got to win this war on terrorism."
Despite a federal budget deficit that could balloon to more than $500 billion next year, Bradley insisted the spending would not cool economic recovery. And, he said, rolling back tax cuts was not the answer, as many Democrats have suggested.
"I continue to believe that we need to stimulate the economy here at home and that the tax cuts are working and doing their job in terms of getting the economy growing," he said.
Bradley acknowledged that Bush's tax cuts, which are being phased in, have added significantly to the deficit. Leading Democrats contend upcoming cuts should be eliminated.
He added, "If you look at the deficit in the context of what our needs are as a nation, our security and our need to get the economy going again, I think it's acceptable - it's not good, but it's acceptable - to run a deficit on a short-term basis."
U.S. Congressman Charles Bass. R-N.H., said he also supports the President's request and expects it to pass, albeit after close scrutiny on Capitol Hill.
"I think there'll be a lot of questions about where it leads us," Bass said. He raised questions about how much help the United States will be able to garner from other nations and how much of the costs it will be able to recoup.
"Is it just a gift?" Bass said of the reconstruction money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bass said he also recognized that a record-high deficit could hobble the economy, but said the risk was justified. The United States, he said, must "make good on its word that it can control the forces of anarchy and terrorism."
But at least one economic expert said the deficit could stifle growth by raising interest rates and pulling vital funds away from other economic tools.
"It limits the ability for the government to invest in other areas that are very important to the economy, like physical infrastructure, communication infrastructure and education at all different levels," said Ross Gittell, a professor of business and management at the University of New Hampshire. He added that government borrowing can drive up interest rates and slow economic growth.
Sen. John E. Sununu, R-N.H., said security abroad is crucial to economic recovery at home.
"I've seen no direct evidence that deficits are driving higher interest rates," he said, noting that the nation has seen record-low rates this year. "I think the money is going to be critical to govern the cost of deployment in Iraq and critical reconstruction. Stability and security overseas does have an effect on America's economy. We simply can't short-change national security."
New Hampshire's other senator, Republican Judd Gregg, was not available for comment yesterday.
