A former top executive of a software company that engaged in illegal bookkeeping deals with America Online was sentenced to nearly three years in prison yesterday for conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Jeffrey R. Anderson, a former senior vice president at PurchasePro.com Inc., a now-defunct Las Vegas software company, pleaded guilty in September in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. He admitted engaging in a scheme that allowed the publicly traded company to falsely inflate revenues to meet Wall Street expectations.

As part of a plea agreement, Anderson agreed to cooperate with the investigation, which federal prosecutors said is ongoing.

The biggest hits are aimed at the state's Medi-Cal program, which would lose close to $900 million next year under the governor's proposal. The state's program to bring welfare recipients into the work force is also targeted in his plan with a $800 million cut.

City and county governments, already upset by the loss of about $4 billion they were expecting from a car tax increase that Schwarzenegger repealed, also would lose out.

The governor proposed taking an additional $1.3 billion that the local governments are counting on and instead use it to pay state expenses. The move is a shift from Schwarzenegger's previous pledge to protect the local governments, though he said Friday that he would still find a way to replace the lost car tax revenue.

When Bush went to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us."

The local police, at the Secret Service's behest, set up a "designated free-speech zone" on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush's speech.

The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, but folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president's path. Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly conduct; the police also confiscated his sign.

Neel later commented, "As far as I'm concerned, the whole country is a free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind."

At Neel's trial, police Detective John Ianachione testified that the Secret Service told local police to confine "people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views" in a so-called free- speech area.

Denise Lieberman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri commented, "No one could see them from the street. In addition, the media were not allowed to talk to them. The police would not allow any media inside the protest area and wouldn't allow any of the protesters out of the protest zone to talk to the media."