Mr Howard said the intelligence did not surface because it was buried in a pile of other spy material, while Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer said the agencies at the time did not think the allegations were serious.

Labor's foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, repeated his accusation that Mr Howard "lied to the Australian people" when he told them this month that all documents had been provided to the Cole Commission.

In fact, a damning bundle of intelligence reports from agencies such as ASIO, the Office of National Assessments, Defence Intelligence Organisation and others surfaced on Tuesday.

A summary of the documents produced two days later showed that Australia's spies were fully aware of illegal payments to Saddam via the sham Jordanian trucking company, Alia.

Though AWB was not named, the spies suspected that "Australian companies" were using Alia to get around UN sanctions designed to stop the Iraqi president from getting any cash from the West.

AWB was later found by the UN to be the chief sanctions-busting culprit, paying the dictatorship $300 million in kickbacks.

The spy documents also suggest the Government's intelligence arm was concerned the kickbacks were being used to buy military goods or parts abroad.

Lawyers at the Cole Commission yesterday demanded that they be permitted to see the entire intelligence dossier, which Commissioner Terence Cole, QC, has so far kept secret.

A battery of silks representing AWB and its executives called on Commissioner Cole to let them see the secret files, with one barrister describing the commission as a charade.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley yesterday urged the Howard Government to apologise to the US for "funding the enemy".

Less than a week later, the Senate's Republican majority overwhelmingly approved billions of dollars in deficit spending. And despite cries of outrage from conservative groups that helped build the GOP majorities in both houses of Congress, the Republican spenders were undeterred for one simple reason:

They're convinced that voters care less about big deficits than they do about the things that increased federal spending will buy.

"Senators are betting that pandering to the public with billions in election-year promises will pay off more than they lose by cutting the fiscal conservatives in their own party off at the knees," said Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

That political calculation lay behind congressional Republicans' support for creation of the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement in 2003. And it drove Thursday's votes to raise the debt ceiling and approve more deficit spending.

There was another reason many congressional Republicans have turned away from old-fashioned fiscal discipline. Two other elements in the conservative credo, support for greater spending on national security and determination to cut taxes, have left budget makers with so little room to maneuver that significant budget cuts have become extremely hard to make.

Some Republicans warned that the GOP could pay a heavy price for yielding to spending pressures.

Former Rep. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., who now heads the free-market-oriented Club for Growth, warned that, "Republican voters are going to ask themselves, 'Why bother having Republicans in office?' " Senate Republicans not only have shown "absolutely no semblance of discipline on spending," said Toomey, but they have failed to extend President Bush's expiring tax cuts.

"If they can't do either taxes or spending right, how do they expect Republicans to turn out in the fall to re-elect Republican majorities?" Toomey said. "I think they're in ... for a very rude awakening in November."

"It's a suicide mission," agreed Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. "All this spending has us on a collision course with fiscal disaster." he said. Nonetheless, while he voted consistently against spending proposals this week, in the end he also voted for the final Senate budget with all its added billions.

Democrats, long vilified by their opponents as the tax-and-spend party, think they can turn the tables by calling the Republicans the party of borrow and spend. The federal budget, in surplus when Bush took office in 2001, immediately ran deficits that assumed record proportions.

Rep. John Tanner, D-Tenn., told the House Wednesday that he grew up with three principles: "Live within your means, pay your debts and invest in the future. This government under this leadership is doing none of those."

He noted that on Thursday the House approved a $92 billion so-called "emergency" spending bill that provided $68 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and $19 billion for communities struck by Hurricane Katrina. The bill passed handily, 348 to 71, with only 19 Republicans joining 52 Democrats in opposition.

The Senate meanwhile added about $16 billion for a host of domestic programs, including health, education and heating assistance for the poor, to the $2.8 trillion budget for fiscal year 2007 that its Budget Committee had recommended. The budget passed by a scant 51 to 49, with a lone Democrat -- Mary Landrieu of Louisiana -- joining 50 Republicans to form the majority and five Republicans voting no, mostly to protest the budget's call for legislation to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

"When it comes to fiscal discipline," said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a budget watchdog group, "the gap between rhetoric and reality on Capitol Hill is as wide as the deficit."

Spending has grown more in Bush's five years in office than it had in President Clinton's eight, even excluding the boom in defense spending under Bush. Altogether, spending rose about 4 percent a year under Clinton and 9 percent a year under Bush.

Despite those numbers, some Republicans think the Democrats will have a hard time persuading the public that they are the party of spending restraint. "It would be even worse under the Democrats," said former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.

And restraint might have lost some of its political appeal. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in its annual survey in January of what issues weigh on the public, said just 36 percent of conservative Republicans rated the deficit as a "top priority," placing it well below eduction, jobs, terrorism and illegal immigration.

"The deficit," said Carroll Doherty of the Pew center, "does not have the same resonance that it did through much of the 1990s."

Paying homage to fiscal responsibility is apparently still mandatory for Republican politicians who aspire to higher office. Among politicians who vowed to curb spending last week when they addressed a combined meeting of the Southern and Midwestern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis were four of the party's leading presidential hopefuls: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Sen. George Allen of Virginia and Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas.

All four, however, supported the final budget bill.

Some fiscal conservatives in the House were so furious at the absence of spending cuts to compensate for the extra hurricane relief that they voted against the entire spending bill, including money for the wars.

"I strongly support our troops," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas. "Successfully fighting the war on terror is our most important national priority, but another national priority is saving our children from a mountain of debt or unconscionable tax increases," he said.

For other conservative members of Congress, local interests trumped ideology. Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., issued a statement Friday praising the Senate vote to make room for another $235 million for rural health care.

"While it is important to identify and eliminate wasteful and inefficient programs," Thomas said, "I also believe that we must support policies that work."

Boehner also flew at least 45 times on corporate jets owned by companies "with a financial stake in congressional affairs" from June 2001 through September 2005, the center reported. The corporations on whose planes Boehner flew included tobacco companies such as R.J. Reynolds Tobacco (15 times), UST Inc. (seven times) and Swisher International Inc. (seven times).

"Boehner is one of Congress' most frequent corporate fliers," Roberta Baskin, executive director of the center, said, based on a review of other lawmakers' disclosure forms.

Political, business ties criticized

The report is the most detailed and comprehensive look at the new majority leader. Boehner, who was elected to the post last month, had been criticized by lawmakers who opposed his elevation for being too close to lobbyists.

Boehner rejected that characterization and offered himself as an agent of change, especially on the issue of congressional ethics. The center concluded, however, that Boehner built "a network of political and business relationships" with corporations and other interests "not unlike" his predecessor, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), whose tenure in the job was controversial in large part because of his close ties to lobbyists and lobbying groups. DeLay stepped down last year after he was indicted in Texas on charges of political money laundering.

In the early debate over how to crack down on lobbyists -- a byproduct of the guilty plea in January of former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff -- Boehner had been a leading opponent of a ban on privately paid travel. One of his first public pronouncements after winning the second-ranking position in the House leadership was to declare his disagreement with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), who wanted to end travel paid for by private interests.

Boehner pushed instead for enhanced disclosure of privately provided benefits including travel, meals and gifts -- the direction the House now appears to be taking in pending legislation. In the meantime, he has accepted a compromise that would ban privately paid travel this year until the House ethics committee devises new rules.

Trips called legal, proper, educational
Kevin A. Madden, a Boehner spokesman, defended the lawmaker's trips as legal, proper and educational. He said Boehner's initial enmity toward a ban on privately paid trips was not because he has taken so many of them.

Rather, Madden pointed to the center's report as proof that disclosure works well. Madden said the study was possible because of the thorough disclosures Boehner made through the years and which he now advocates expanding. The center was able to detail Boehner's activities because his trips, "in each and every instance, were promptly and publicly disclosed according to law," Madden said.

"The fact that this report uses publicly available documents underscores Mr. Boehner's commitment to transparency and full disclosure," Madden said. "The entire approach of transparency and disclosure is so that groups like this one [the center] aren't the ultimate judge. The voters are."

Among the places Boehner traveled on privately financed trips were Edinburgh, Scotland; Venice; Brussels; and Barcelona, the center said. Two of his domestic destinations, which the center pointed out are famous for their golf courses, were Boca Raton, Fla., and Scottsdale, Ariz.

Thousands spent to 'wine and dine'

The report said Boehner received more than $160,000 in food, lodging, transportation and other expenditures on his privately paid journeys. His benefactors included the Chicago Board of Trade, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, CSX Corp. and the Sallie Mae Foundation.

The congressman also "hosted many high-end fundraisers to wine and dine potential donors and Republican colleagues," the center said. Boehner's Freedom Project political action committee, which he used to help fellow Republicans get elected to Congress, paid more than $119,000 for golf-outing fundraisers from March 2003 through the end of 2005, the center said. It also paid $25,000 to Duck Soup, the "unofficial band of the PGA Tour."

The same leadership PAC spent more than $87,000 on food, beverages and fund-raising costs at Sam & Harry's, a D.C. steakhouse popular with lobbyists, from 2001 through August 2005. It also paid more than $40,000 over two nights at Washington's Hard Rock Cafe, the center reported.

Boehner's spokesman said that those kinds of expenditures were commonplace for fundraising events.

Boehner's staff has benefited from corporate-paid travel. The congressman approved trips taken by dozens of his aides from his personal office and the staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which he chaired starting in 2001. Over the past five years, the center said, his staff aides took more than 150 privately paid trips worth more than $200,000 to locations as far-flung as Japan and Europe.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

We knew immigration was a contentious issue and all, but wait until you hear the epithets that Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) hurled at Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), Congress' chief immigration critic, after a live debate they had on CNBC Wednesday. Sneak preview: They include "bigot," "racist" and "KKK."

After the lunchtime show in the Cannon Rotunda ended, Gutierrez made a joke about how the "immigrant" (him, though he was born in Chicago) showed up on time while the "Gringo" (Tancredo) was late. Gutierrez told Tancredo that he had a "really ugly policy."

The way Gutierrez's office tells the story, Tancredo and the two aides who accompanied him followed Gutierrez to his office. Tancredo kept "following him, touching him, following him, touching him," Gutierrez spokesman Scott Frotman said.

At that point, Gutierrez pretty much snapped. "Have you ever eaten in a restaurant?" he asked Tancredo, adding with feigned disgust, "How could you eat from the plates touched by those nasty illegal immigrants?"

Last summer, the court largely upheld the EPA's approach against multipronged challenges from industry, state governments and environmental groups. Friday's ruling was a defeat for the agency and for industry, and a victory for the states and their environmentalist allies.

In the earlier case, a panel including two of the three judges in Friday's decision found that EPA had acted reasonably in 2002 when it issued a rule changing how pollution would be measured. Effectively, that rule loosened the strictures on companies making changes to their equipment and operations.

But Friday, the court said the EPA went too far in 2003 when it issued a separate new regulation that opponents said would exempt most equipment changes from environmental reviews, even changes that would result in higher emissions.

With a wry footnote to Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," the court said that "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world" could the law be read otherwise.

"We decline such a world view," said their unanimous decision, written by Judge Judith W. Rogers, an appointee of President Clinton. She was joined by Judge David Tatel, another Clinton appointee, and Judge Janice Rogers Brown, appointed last year by President Bush.

States deemed winners:

The winners this time were more than a dozen states, including New York and California, and a large group of environmental organizations. They hailed the decision as one of their most important gains in years of litigation, regulation and legal challenges under the Clean Air Act.

"This is an enormous victory over the concerted efforts by the Bush administration to dismantle the Clean Air Act," said Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general whose office led the opposition from the states. Spitzer, who is running for governor of New York, said the ruling "shows that the administration's effort to misinterpret and undermine the statute is illegal."

Five Alabama Power Co. plants were among 32 facilities nationwide that the U.S. Department of Justice was pursuing, claiming they did not fully comply with the modern Clean Air Act. After the Bush administration relaxed the rules, the cases languished.

A company spokesman said Friday it was unclear if the ruling would affect Alabama Power. The utility is in mediation with the Justice Department to resolve the lawsuit.

National environmental groups have blamed the Southern Co., Alabama Power's parent company, for the changes, arguing it has been the leader in an aggressive campaign to roll back the Clean Air Act.

Stability at stake:

"This is a terrible decision," said Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a trade organization, arguing the "any physical change" definition creates financial instability for plant operators who spend as much as $800 million for a new boiler.

The EPA issued only a brief statement, saying: "We are disappointed that the court did not find in favor of the United States. We are reviewing and analyzing the opinion."

The decision is unlikely to be the last word. Several circuit courts or appeals courts have considered or decided related cases, and the issue may eventually land, by one path or another, at the Supreme Court.

Some in Congress say the uncertainty demands an overhaul of the Clean Air Act itself, but there has been no real movement in that direction in recent years.

Bogus masculine posturing seems to be the style of the current US administration. Its most conspicuous expression was perhaps Bush's "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity after the invasion of Iraq. There he was, this veteran of the home guard, clad in a snug-fitting flight suit, strutting the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln among real warriors, and claiming victory. It was, wrote one commentator, "a masculine drag performance". Similar posturing went on in the Republican convention before the last presidential election: politicians whose own warlike masculinity was nonexistent strove very effectively to effeminise John Kerry, who really had been a hero. So we had Cheney, rather obscenely, accusing the Democratic candidate of wanting to show al-Qaida a "softer side", and muscle-bound Arnold Schwarzenegger making his famous reference to "girlie-men".

Why do current US political officeholders feel the need for such a transparent strategy, and why does it seem to work? To be sure, political power and shows of masculinity have traditionally gone closely together. In the past, rulers led their troops into battle and, even in peacetime, called themselves fathers of their people. And modern politics retains abundant masculine rituals. Prime minister's question time in Britain, for instance, is a stylised duel and tournament redolent of testosterone. By way of voice lessons, wearing severe suits and her own aggression, Margaret Thatcher mastered it (the verb seems appropriate).

Yet the historic fact that power has usually been male scarcely explains why American politicians now appear to feel an obligation to try so very hard. Nor does it explain why Kerry's Purple Heart and Silver Star, won in combat, didn't win greater electoral dividends. As far as the latter's failure with the voters was concerned, I suspect that his allusions to his own heroism in the Democratic convention ("reporting for duty") struck a false note. Anyone who has spoken to experienced combat troops knows that they rarely brag about their exploits. Strong and silent is the preferred style.

The fact that Kerry was encouraged by his advisers to deviate from this mode, rather than maintaining a dignified reticence about his Vietnam record and letting it speak for itself, was yet another aspect of the Democrats' ineptitude in the last presidential election. None the less, the tendency of some US voters to dismiss Kerry, despite all his medals, as "French" - which for Americans, as for Britons, is often a euphemism for effeminate - and to be impressed by George Bush's bluster, his wearing of a Stetson, a leather jacket and cowboy boots on his ranch, and images of him chain-sawing trees, suggests at the very least a degree of confusion about what does constitute masculinity.

This is surely one reason why the Republicans - and, indeed, some Democrats (think of Bill Clinton's busy sexual adventurism) - have been tempted in recent times to use postures of masculinity to such a crass degree. They are not acting this way because Americans possess a strong and confident cult of the masculine virtues, but rather because many are anxiously uncertain about just what these virtues are. These uncertainties stem in part from America's own domestic situation. In some respects, female emancipation has progressed further there than in Europe. At present both the Republican and Democratic parties possess powerful female figures who may well come into play in 2008, in Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. By contrast, in Britain female MPs were nowhere in the recent Conservative and Lib Dem leadership contests - just as they will be nowhere in the race to lead the Labour party when Tony Blair stands down.

Partly because women in the US are better represented in the hierarchies, the culture wars over gender there have been particularly fierce. This can be seen in the ferocity of the debates over gay marriage, but also over far less serious things. It should, for instance, have come as no surprise that Brokeback Mountain, with its deconstruction of one of the most iconic American male heroes - the cowboy - did rather better at the Baftas in London than at the Oscars in Hollywood. For some Americans, I suspect, this movie was too uncomfortable, even heretical. It scratched at issues that were already irritating.

One way of understanding the bogus masculine posturing of the likes of Bush and Cheney is to view it as a kind of comfort blanket being knowingly extended to troubled American voters (of both sexes) who feel deeply worried that conventional gender roles in their country are unravelling. Male blue-collar workers, who have witnessed the disappearance in recent years of large numbers of conventional masculine jobs in heavy industry, and evangelical Christians concerned about the sanctity and survival of the family are particularly susceptible to such strategies on the part of knowing politicians, however crude and artificial they may seem to non-believers.

There is, however, another factor in play. In Britain, as in the rest of Europe, politics remains overwhelmingly a male pursuit, but it is no longer necessary to try too hard. David Cameron could get away with simply patting his pregnant wife's bump, a New Man gesture that was also, of course, a gesture of proprietorship and potency. But Blair and he do not need to strut upon battleships, however much they might enjoy doing so. Britain, like other European states, is not and never will again be in the topworld- power league, so its male leaders can afford to play subtler, more variegated roles. Leaders of the US don't have that option. They preside over an empire, over the biggest military power the world has ever seen, which is now at war. The pressure on them to be seen to be conventionally masculine is therefore enormous. Just how Hillary Clinton in particular will cope with this in 2008 is not clear.

· Linda Colley is the author of Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, and professor of history at Princeton University lcolley@princeton.edu