House G.O.P. Offers Violence Act With Fewer Specific Protections

The version of the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act that House Republicans unveiled Friday afternoon â€" which excludes specific protections for gay, bisexual or transgender victims of domestic abuse, and offers limited provisions for Native American women on reservations â€" is already facing fierce criticism from Democrats and women’s and human rights groups.

“This is unacceptable and must be rejected in the strongest possible terms,” Michelle Ringuette, Amnesty International USA’s chief of campaigns and programs, said in a statement. “The U.S. government has a responsibility to ensure that all women are protected from violence, not just those favored by political expediencies.”

The bill, which reauthorizes a 1994 law that assists victims of domestic and sexual violence, is similar to a reauthorization bill passed in the Senate last week with 78 votes, includingthose of all female senators, all Democrats and just over half of Republicans. But the House version differs in two crucial respects: it eliminates “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” from a list of “underserved populations” who face barriers to accessing and receiving victim services, and it falls short of the Senate bill in offering protections for American Indian women.

Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington and the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, will take the lead on the bill, which the House is expected to vote on next week.

The Senate bill allows American Indian women who are assaulted on reservations by non-Indians to go to tribal courts, which do not have jurisdiction over assailants who do not live on tribal land. The House bill offers the same provision, a change from a version introduced in the last! Congress, but it also gives assailants the possibility to take their case outside of the tribal system.

While in a statement Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and a Native American, praised the House bill’s “progress in the right direction for protecting Native women,” he added, “However, the legislation still falls short in providing tribes the authority they need to secure their territory and protect their citizens.” He said he would offer an amendment to address the “shortcomings.”

A spokesman for Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia said that the House was expected to take up the measure next week. The spokesman added, “Majority Leader Cantor is committed to ending violence against all women and has worked hard to build consensus with members on both sides of the aisle and worked alongside advocate groups to put together the strongest possible bill.”

But based on the initial outcry from Democrats, such a consensus seems nlikely.

“The Republican plan omits protections for the LGBT community, offers inadequate assistance to Native American women, and leaves out critical human trafficking provisions,” Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said in a statement. “It was written in secret; it is not a compromise; it is not bipartisan; and it will not become law.”

House Republicans rejected the characterization that their bill does not do enough to help certain groups of women, arguing that in not spelling out all of the protected groups, their bill offers a broader, more inclusive protection for “all women” â€" including, they say, gay and bisexual women.

“What the House will consider is a strong Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act that will protect all women from acts of violence and help law enforcement prosecute offenders to fullest extent of the law,” said Nate Hodson, a spokesman for Ms. McMorris Rodgers.

Many women’s groups, however, w! eren’t ! satisfied.

“We were extremely hopeful that House leadership would introduce a bill that would safely and effectively meet the needs of all victims,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. “Unfortunately, the House substitute introduced today fails to do so.”

Digging for Hagel Dirt: An Update

Conservative groups working to derail the nomination of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary said last week that they planned to use the Senate’s weeklong recess to unearth anything they could to block him.

Turns out, that’s expensive work. And one of the groups, Rick Santorum’s “super PAC” Patriot Voices, is using the delay on Mr. Hagel’s confirmation vote to raise money.

Mr. Santorum himself took to passing the hat, writing in an e-mail to supporters this week that the group needed to raise an additional $10,000 or it would have to abandon its efforts to oppose Mr. Hagel.

“My staff tells me that if we don’t get on pace to raise $10,000 by this Friday, we’ll have to shut down our ‘No to Chuck’ effort early,” Mr. Santorum wrote in the e-mail. “So please, don’t delay. Make the most generous emergency contribution you can right away. We appreciate your dedication and support. Thank you and God Bless.”

Mr. Santorum, whose unsuccessful bid for the Republican pesidential nod in 2012 nonetheless raised his profile among conservatives, said that his group’s efforts had resulted in sending more than 56,000 e-mails to senators urging them to vote down Mr. Hagel’s nomination. And the group was continuing efforts to recruit more people to write and call.

Though these groups have presumably been hard at work trying to dig up unflattering information about Mr. Hagel’s old remarks on subjects like Israel and Iran â€" topics he has tripped up on in the past â€" nothing of substance has surfaced yet.

In fact, one of the groups that some conservative outlets claimed Mr. Hagel had ties to â€" an outfit said to be called Friends of Hamas â€" does not even appear to exist.

The Senate was planning to move forward with a vote on Mr. Hagel’s nomination as early as Tuesday. And if Democrats break the Republican ! filibuster efforts, which they appear to have enough votes to do, Mr. Hagel would be confirmed.

Qualcomm Agrees to Reveal Donations to Tax-Exempt Groups

Qualcomm, Inc., the country’s largest maker of computer chips for mobile devices, will voluntarily disclose previously secret political contributions to tax-exempt groups under a settlement announced Friday with the New York State comptroller.

New York’s suit marked a new tactic in the growing battle by officials and activists nationwide to bring more sunlight to tax-exempt groups that they believe help corporations spend money on political influence outside the jurisdiction of federal campaign disclosure laws.

The comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, filed a suit against Qualcomm last month in Delaware Chancery Court on behalf of New York’s public employee retirement fund, asserting the fund’s right as a Qualcomm shareholder to inspect records of the company’s political spending.

In reaching the settlement, Mr. DiNapoli agreed to drop he lawsuit, leaving untested the proposition that activist shareholders could use Delaware’s unique corporate governance laws to force more political disclosure on the hundreds of large corporations that are based in the state. But Qualcomm immediately posted on its Web site a new list of previously undisclosed political contributions to tax-exempt groups, along with a new corporate disclosure policy that transparency advocates hailed as one of the most complete in the nation.

“Qualcomm’s disclosure policy sets a high standard for transparency in corporate political spending disclosure, and the company deserves praise for its actions,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement. “This is a significant milestone in greater transparency in corporate political spending.”

With efforts to legislate more disclosure showing little progress in Congress, shareholder groups and corporate transparency advocates! have pushed many large companies to voluntarily share more information about their political spending. Mr. DiNapoli is among a small group of public officials who have tried to leverage their own jurisdictions - in Mr. DiNapoli’s case, as sole trustee of one of the country’s largest pension funds - to take even more aggressive action.

Qualcomm’s founder, Irwin Jacobs, is a major donor to Democratic super PACs, politicians and tax-exempt groups, and the firm’s employees were generous donors to President Obama. But the new disclosures reveal that the company’s contributions to politically active nonprofit groups, lobbying outfits and trade associations rival its previously disclosed contributions to candidates and party organizations.

The largest single contribution, $1 million, went to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a business-backed group that has lobbied for a so-called grand bargain on losing the deficit, restructuring Social Security, and closing tax loopholes. Tens of thousands more went to center-left or nonpartisan advocacy groups, like No Labels or Third Way.

Additionally, $1.8 million went to a variety of trade groups, including $385,000 to the United States Chamber of Commerce.

“Qualcomm agrees with the New York State Common Retirement Fund that increased transparency for election-related activities by corporations is very beneficial,” said Paul E. Jacobs, Qualcomm’s chief executive. “While Qualcomm has been developing a new policy on disclosure of political expenditures for some time, engaging with the Common Retirement Fund has been helpful.”

What ‘House of Cards’ Gets Right and Wrong

The Washington that majestically unfurls in the credits for “House of Cards” is recognizable to anybody who has spent time there. But even though it can be a monumental kingdom filled with portent, it can also be a fairly quotidian and sometimes ugly small town â€" but that’s not the kind of place you make a huge, expensive television show about.

An original series picked up and distributed by Netflix, “House of Cards” is a great looking, lavishly made 13-episode series based on a BBC miniseries. It was developed and produced by Beau Willimon, a guy steeped in politics as an aide to Charles Schumer, Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton and who also wrote “The Ides of March,” a film directed by George Clooney that got high marks from politicos for its verisimilitude.

“House of Cards” revolves around Frank Underwood (played with lizard-like glory by Kevin Spacey), a Democrat and House Majority Whip, who, when passed over for a promotion to Secretary of State wreaks revenge on all wo would lay him low. His willing partner is Zoe Barnes (played by Kate Mara), a reporter/blogger at The Washington Herald, a fictional establishment newspaper in the capital.

Given that the series seems intended to pull back the blankets on the “real” side of both politics and media â€" two professions held in profoundly low regard by the rest of the world â€" we thought it might be fun to go argue about what the series gets right and wrong. We decided a New York/DC and politics/media division of labor might yield a worthy discussion: Ashley Parker currently covers Congress and has covered a number of campaigns. David Carr writes about media for the business section and writes about pop culture as well.

A cautionary note: Netflix began streaming the entire 13-episode season on Feb. 1 so our cadence in reviewing the episodes â€" every two or three days over the next month â€" is an entirely artificial one. If you haven’t started watching “House of Cards,” know that spoilers abou! nd here. Read at your peril.

Episode One

Synoposis: Frank Underwood, confronted by the broken promise from the president, begins laying down track to run over those who wronged him. Zoe Barnes, frustrated by her lowly status at the newspaper, seeks to form alliances that will allow her to prosper professionally.

Carr: I am struck by the visual vocabulary of the show. Politics, no matter how sleazy, go off in rooms and halls that could well have hosted Louis XIV. In spite of the fact that Mr. Underwood says he is there to “clear the pipes and keep the sludge moving,” the sheer marbleness of his environs suggests that the plumbing is kept carefully out of view.

Journalism gets very different art direction. The lighting in The Washington Herald is brutal, irradiating the pasty face trolls who are trapped in cubes there and the furniture looks like it came from a V.F.W. hall. (To be fair, the director David Finche filmed the newsroom scenes in part of the offices of The Baltimore Sun, so it’s not like the general aesthetic came from nowhere.)

Zoe Barnes’ apartment is one of the saddest places on earth â€" a second floor walk-up on a grubby commercial strip full of water (or worse) stains, pizza boxes and windows so dirty they don’t function as such. The only thing missing is an underfed cat with an untended litter box who hates her guts, but you can almost smell it anyway. The dreary, humble backdrop seems meant to establish her cred as a blogger. This revolution will come from people on laptops who have no furniture.

That dissonance extends to fashion. While Mr. Underwood and the women and men who click behind him as he patrols the corridors in search of souls to snack on are impeccably turned out, Ms. Barnes is a walking pile of laundry. I edited a weekly ! newspaper! in Washington D.C. staffed by very talented young people. And I also encountered many young staffers on the rise on the Hill. I didn’t see the two groups of young people as fundamentally different: They were ambitious and idealistic in equal measure while Ms. Barnes’ desires seem more inchoate and epically shallow.

Oddly enough, it is Ms. Barnes’ wardrobe and not her enterprise as a reporter that opens up the gates to Mr. Underwood’s world. She attends the symphony on a random date in a little white dress that etches her figure and catches a backward glance from Mr. Underwood. When she is sent a photo of the congressman checking her out, she takes that as permission to show up at his home at 10:30 at night â€" and she is invited inside. The pair proceed to have a conversation about her breasts, framed in a push-up bra and v-neck shirt. After she leaves, Mr. Underwood’s wife (played with frozen precision by Robin Wright) wonders aloud whether that gambit actually works on anyone. The answer ut in the real world is not for long, while the answer on the show is yet to be determined.

I’m glad the show exists, I care about the characters and am eager to watch more. But I’m still going to need some convincing, particularly in terms of the characters’ motives. Mr. Underwood’s desires are vividly stated in his winking asides to the camera. What does Ms. Barnes want She tells her editor and anyone else who will listen that she is tired of covering Fairfax County and wants to be moved “online,” where she will go “underground.” Why To what end

Given that you’ve started covering Congress and have been around politics for much of your career, Ashley, I’m wondering what clanked and what connected in the series so far

PARKER: The show seems to get the micro and macro right, but it’s those brushstrokes in the middle â€" where the story is really being told â€" that sometimes blur.

On those tiny details that no one but the most in-the-weeds of Washin! gton stal! warts pay attention to, “House of Cards” is dead on â€" the opening credits, with the colorful but faded row homes and the shot of the Kennedy Center glowing translucent silver at night; the paper visitor’s badge that the White House chief of staff wears when she pays Mr. Underwood in his House office; the hand sanitizer dispensaries that serve as sentries throughout the Capitol; the pristine copy of Roll Call casually set out on the table in Mr. Underwood’s office; the security detail assigned to the majority whip. All exactly right.

And in terms of capturing the broad truths about the city, the show comes pretty close, as well. It gets at the ultimately transactional nature of much of the nation’s capital â€" the former governor of Pennsylvania who delivers his state in exchange for the vice presidency, or the way Mr. Underwood expects a plum assignment for his role in helping the president’s campaign. And it gets at the perpetual striving. “I’m better than what they have me doing,❠Ms. Barnes says, a lament that I imagine nearly every Washington staffer/aide/journalist/human being has felt at one time or another.

When Mr. Underwood, talking about his plan to discredit the president’s pick for the Secretary of State job believes he should have been his, says, “Nobody’s a Boy Scout, not even a Boy Scout,” he might as well be channeling a political truth as old as time. Willie Stark told Jack Burden the exact same thing in “All the King’s Men,” with his classic, “There’s always something.”

But there are things I take issue with, Zoe Barnes, for starters. I have a feeling that, going forward, we’ll be talking a lot about this young reporter who seems more than willing to trade sex for scoops. But for now, I’ll just say that the overtly transactional â€" not to mention sexual â€" nature of Ms. Barnes’s first approach to Mr. Underwood seems a bit too, well, overt, transactional and sexual.

“I protect your identity, I print what you tell! me, and ! I’ll never ask any questions,” she says, offering to be a virtual transcription monkey after her sexy outfit and picture gets her literally through the front door. (I can’t imagine many publications â€" dead-tree, online, or otherwise â€" scrambling to hire a reporter whose opening pitch is that she’ll ask no questions.)

And, as Politico’s Jake Sherman rather aptly pointed out to me this week: “The only way I would ever show up at the majority whip’s door at 10:30 at night was if we had evidence he had murdered someone and I needed to track him down ASAP.” Presumably, a few other news developments would do the trick for an at-home stake-out, but you get the idea.

Coming soon: Episode 2, in which Mr. Underwood snacks on fellow politicians and Ms. Barnes’s appetites draw suspicion from her colleagues.

Hopes for a Grand Bargain Belie Critical Differences

WASHINGTON - Even as President Obama lashes out at Republicans over the automatic spending cuts that take effect next week, he is simultaneously sending them a strikingly different message: he is still interested in a big deficit-reduction deal and as evidence of his good faith has left on the table proposed Medicare and Social Security cuts that liberals hate.

With neither side making much effort to avert the across-the-board reductions in military and domestic progras that kick in next Friday, signals from the White House about a much more ambitious budget package might seem to be somewhere between delusional and beside the point - not to mention politically self-serving. On Capitol Hill, Republicans say Mr. Obama has actually backtracked from where he was 18 months ago on reining in the entitlement programs and has shown no willingness to do anything really hard to get the nation’s long-term debt problems under control.

But administration officials say that some kind of opportunity is likely to present itself this year to engage Congressional Republicans on a comprehensive plan. In addition to rebutting Republican claims that he has no plan of his own, Mr. Obama wants to make clear to Republicans, aides said, that even after the failure of successive negotiations he remains willing to make difficult concessions.

That is especially true, they said, when it comes to entitlement programs, the focus of t! he sharpest ideological clashes between the two parties and the biggest contributors to the long-term budget imbalances.

His aides point to Mr. Obama’s continued willingness to swallow, over the intensifying objections of most of the left side of his party, a new way of calculating inflation adjustments for Social Security benefits that would reduce the growth of payments - in effect, a benefit cut. And Mr. Obama has alluded repeatedly to his willingness to re-engage with Republicans based on his last offer for $400 billion in Medicare cuts, made during the negotiations in December over the so-called fiscal cliff; that’s a level that gives heartburn to some Democrats in Congress wh see no need to compromise at this point.

“That offer is out there for them to accept anytime they want to take it, and it carries some considerable cost to us,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “I’m not sure what more we could do to show we’re serious.”

The continued maneuvering reflects a calculation inside the White House that there is still a path to a legacy-enhancing budget deal, notwithstanding Speaker John A. Boehner’s pledge not to allow any tax increases or engage in closed-door negotiations with the president.

The starting point, administration officials say, is to allow the normal bud! get proce! ss to play out in Congress in coming months, while encouraging both parties to explore ideas for overhauling the tax code. At some point the Democratic-controlled Senate and the Republican-controlled House could begin to consider areas for compromise, providing a natural forum for a negotiation in which Mr. Obama would not necessarily need to be the central player.

To the degree that an improving economy and signs of a reduced rate of growth in health care costs push projected budget deficits lower, the climate for a deal could also brighten.

But that optimistic view of the possibilities ignores the deep differences between the parties, not only on taxes, the most obvious sticking point, but also on entitlement programs, where Democrats and Republicans have such profoundly different viewpoints about what needs to be done that a deal would require one or the other of them to budge in a fundamenal way.

While Mr. Obama clearly sees his offer on entitlements as a way to build trust with Republicans, many conservatives see it as evidence that they will never reach an accord because they define the problem in such different ways.

Mr. Obama sees the challenge of Medicare largely as a matter of reducing federal outlays for the existing system by limiting payments to providers and better employing the government’s purchasing power; many Republicans see the current system as unsustainable given the growing costs of an aging population and are seeking to rebuild Medicare in a way that injects far more market competition into health care. The mechanism preferred by conservatives in recent years has been the so-called “premium support” model, in which Medicare beneficiaries would receive a check from the government to purchase their own policies or regular Medicare coverage - the approach championed by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee last year.

In other words, where Mr. Obama sees dealing with Medicare as mostly a matter of math, Republicans see it as a matter of ideology.

“Republicans and Democrats are not just talking about differences of degree,” said Yuval Levin, an informal adviser to Mr. Ryan and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative research group. “They are talking about differences of direction.”

Inside the White House, there is deep skepticism about whether Republicans actually want to address Medicare in an immediate and concrete way - or whether Republicans would prefer to pillory Democrats for backing Medicare cuts, as they did successfully in the 2010 midterm elections and could again in 2014, and avoid voting for anything themselves that could bring a backlash from voters. The most recent version of Mr. Ryan’s plan, for example, would make no changes to Medicare for a decade.

Whether in dealing with the automatic budget cuts or the longer-term issues, the lack of trust between the two sides remains almost complete. To talk successively to senior administration officials and top Republican aides on Capitol Hill this week about the fiscal-policy climate is to be plunged back into bitterly competing narratives about how the other side is unable to stand up to its base, unwilling to give any ground and more interested in turning the politics to its advantage than doing what is right for the country.

“The menu of entitlement reform options discussed over the last two years is the bare minimum necessary to start solving our long-term debt crisis,” said Kevin Smith, communications director for Mr. Boehner. “And the fact that this president is backpedaling on key reforms rather than showing the courage to take on his o! wn party ! is not a promising sign.”

At the White House, they say they do not get enough credit from Republicans for bucking the Democratic Party’s liberal base by supporting the cuts to Social Security’s cost-of-living adjustments. They also point to their willingness to embrace substantial Medicare cuts that would put some Democratic members of Congress at risk in their next elections.

Republicans are especially dismissive of Mr. Obama’s outreach on the entitlement programs. They say that in the summer of 2011 the president was willing to consider increasing the age for Medicare eligibility but has subsequently backed away from that position under pressure from liberals in what Republicans interpret as a sign of unwillingness at the White House to take on anything other than relatively easy cuts to health care providers.

“There has been no leadership from the White House and Senate majority to pursue structural reforms to those programs,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, “despite the importance of saving Medicare and Medicaid for future generations.”

Follow Richard W. Stevenson on Twitter at @dickstevenson.

Q&A: Moving the Mac’s Dock

Q.

It’s easy to move the Taskbar to a different edge of the screen on a Windows machine, but how do you move the Mac’s row of program icons from the bottom of the screen

A.

The Windows Taskbar â€" that row of program icons and open files that typically appears along the bottom edge of the screen â€" can be moved to the top or sides of the desktop by dragging it with the mouse, or in some later versions of Windows, by unlocking it first before dragging. The Dock, the Mac’s rough equivalent of the Taskbar, can also be moved to other edges of the screen in a few ways.

One method is to click the Mac’s Apple menu up in the top-left corner of the screen, select Dock nd slide over to the submenu with the commands to position the dock on the left or right sides of the desktop. This same sub-menu holds options for automatically hiding the Dock on the screen until you pass the mouse cursor nearby, as well as the option for magnifying the icons stocked in the Dock when you pass the cursor over.

The Apple menu can take you right to the Dock’s settings in the Mac’s System Preferences if you want to fine-tune things further. You can also get to these settings by clicking the System Preferences icon in the Dock itself and clicking the Dock icon. In addition to the controls for positioning the Dock on the desktop, the preferences box contains settings for changing the overall size of it, adjusting the magnification size of the icons and other visual aspects of the Dock.

The Early Word: An Unexpected Assist

In Today’s Times:

• Unexpectedly lending a hand to advance President Obama’s plan to insure more Americans, some Republican governors are yielding to prodding from the health care industry and consumer advocates and moving to expand Medicaid in their states, Abby Goodnough and Robert Pear report.

• Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, is hoping her new book will do more than sell; she wants it to prompt a national discussion about women in the workplace and talk about how to help them achieve career success, Jodi Kantor reports.

• Airports and airlines are bracing for the federal budget cuts due to hit next week, though without certaintyabout precisely when and how the sequester’s spending reductions will affect them, Matthew L. Wald reports.

• With across-the-board spending cuts looming, the White House is confidently approaching its first major challenge of the president’s second term, working to demonstrate the consequences without becoming consumed by the battle, Jeff Zeleny and Jonathan Weisman write.

Washington Happenings:

• Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will attend the Democratic Governors Association Meeting on Friday. Later they will welcome Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan to the White House.

• Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to meet with Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fumio Kishida, at the State Department.