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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 9 January 2001 | Vol II #4 | ||
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| Dr. David Marlett, Editor | 9 January 2001 | Vol II #4 | ||
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Seventy-five Metro buses are running their routes throughout the city emblazoned with the following mangled public service announcement: "DC Public Schools Wants You. Go To Class - It a Blast!!!" Really. No kidding, either.
The ad was designed and paid for by - wait for it - the D.C. public schools. Metro is charging the city $41,000 for this mobile display of epic illiteracy - courtesy of the very people who are supposed to be "educating" Washington's children. No one caught the error - and to call this an "error" is being rather magnanimous - until after the foot-high lettering had already been plastered all over almost 100 buses.
Superintendent Paul L. Vance told The Post he was "infuriated" by the "error" and found it "absolutely inexcusable." He added, "It reinforces the perception that we're less than competent." Really? Who would have thunk it?
"Oh dear, oh dear," said a chagrined D.C. Council member Sharon Ambrose. "What an embarrassment," she told The Post. "The message is, unfortunately, probably going to be that someone in D.C. public schools doesn't know how to write." Or spell. Or parse basic English grammar.
What's especially ironic about this fiasco is that the ad campaign was originally intended to help combat truancy. The idea was to try and convince students who feel that school is a waste of their time that the opposite is true - that one can actually learn valuable things in the classroom. Such as how to spell.
[ Washington Times ]
"Once upon a time, the government guarded against business monopolies. Nowadays, the problem is the government. Its policies harm competitiveness and are helping push the economy toward recession. ... The Nasdaq technology index plummeted from approximately 5,000 to 3,500 after the Clinton Justice Department, Joel Klein and David "Dimpled Chad" Boies spearheaded an attack on Microsoft leading to a court order to break it up. Investors immediately reconsidered technology stocks, realizing that successful risk-taking might be rewarded by a profit-killing visit from Uncle Sam. According to Lawrence Kudlow of ING Baring LLC, the government assault on Microsoft cost the economy nearly $1.3 trillion in wealth loss."
[ Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research ]
(CNSNews.com) - The incoming Bush administration will review "each and every" last minute executive order by President Clinton. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer said in Washington on Friday that the President-elect respects Clinton's right to act with the full powers of the presidency up to his final minutes in office. But, Fleischer added, "We will review each and every one of them. We are taking note of them."
Immigration and Naturalization Service employees were ordered to shred or otherwise conceal files and e-mail containing information on the Elian Gonzalez case considered damaging to the Clinton administration, a lawyer for the agency's employees claimed in a deposition last month.
"People were instructed to remove anything derogatory to the Elian Gonzalez case," testified Donald Appignani, a labor lawyer who represents INS workers, as part of a federal lawsuit filed by Gonzalez's Miami relatives against the Clinton administration.
The Gonzalez file cover-up was first reported Saturday by the Orlando Sun-Sentinel.
On April 22, the Cuban raft boy was snatched from his Miami home at gunpoint in a violent predawn raid. A number of protesters outside said they were roughed up and an NBC News camera crew was beaten and held at gunpoint.
"This is a major break in the case," said attorney Ronald Guralnick, who represents Elian's great uncle Lazaro Gonzalez.
Appignani refused to tell the court the identity of his source or the nature of the files destroyed.
"I'm looking forward to the court's ruling on our motion to compel attorney Appignani to testify to the questions he refused to answer at deposition," said Guralnick.
Appignani says his clients fear reprisals from their employers at the INS and also from the Justice Department.
The labor lawyer also charged that INS officials at the Miami regional office had a pervasive disdain for Cuban-Americans, and even had coffee cups labeled with slogans that poked fun at the violent and traumatic raid.
Appignani charged that INS Regional Director Robert Wallis announced after the raid that "it was the happiest day in his life when he saw a photograph of a person on the ground with a gun pointed at his head, because before the negotiations (to end the stand-off) this person wouldn't shake his hand."
Minutes after the raid ended, NBC soundman Gustavo Moeller alleged that a federal agent held him at gunpoint on the ground outside the Gonzalez home to prevent him and his cameraman-partner, Tony Zumbado, from recording Elian's abduction.
Zumbado was also held at gunpoint after making his way into the house and being beaten to the floor by another federal agent.
Though Moeller was left bleeding and Zumbado had to be hospitalized, an internal review by the INS determined that no one had been assaulted.
By Gordon S. Jones
CNS Commentary from the Free Congress Foundation
President-elect George W. Bush has done an admirable job of putting together his prospective Cabinet. Without exception, his choices are able, experienced, and respected. They seem to have been carefully matched to the agencies and departments they will head, and so have provoked little opposition, except among those on the Left who can never believe that any conservative can be a legitimate office-holder. Those prospective nominees who hold pro-abortion views have not been put in positions with high-visibility responsibility for abortion policy, and that has tended to keep Bush's pro-life supporters calm.
Nevertheless, Mr. Bush is playing with fire, and he needs to be very careful he does not burn his party down. There are a couple of smaller and specific problems, and then there is a much larger issue. The specific problems first:
The most virulently anti-natalist organization in the world is the United Nations, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is moderately pro-abortion, will be in charge of the US contingent in the rat's nest at Turtle Bay. Over the last few years, the permanent bureaucrats of the UN have been encouraged by Clinton appointees at State in their vendetta against people and families. This bunch will require careful watching, and there is a question whether a pro-choice Secretary of State will be up to the job.
The second most anti-natalist organization in the world is the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which will be run by New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman. (The Administrator of EPA has Cabinet rank, though EPA is not, itself, a Cabinet-level agency.) Whitman is the most radical pro-abortion Republican holding high office in America. The number of Republicans who will defend the abortion method known as "partial-birth" can be counted on the fingers of a couple of hands. Whitman not only defends it, but vetoed the New Jersey legislature's prohibition of it. Whitman has apparently bought the Al Gore position that "people are the problem" with the environment, and will tolerate the most extreme measures to keep the numbers down.
At Interior, Colorado lawyer Gale Norton is not nearly as extreme as Whitman in her toleration for abortion, but she will also be in charge of an agency that must balance people and resources. Her pro-abortion stance will not help her make the right choices or select the right people.
These minor cavils aside, these appointments (and some similar lower-levels ones) have larger implications. They promise trouble for the future of the Republican Party. Whatever his intentions, by elevating these pro-abortion Republicans to the national stage, Mr. Bush is showcasing them, giving them his stamp of approval. However well-behaved they may be in the specific positions they hold, their heightened visibility immensely strengthens the pro-abortion faction (it is too small to call a "wing") of the party. The next time there is a battle over anti-abortion platform language at a nomination convention (and I think it's safe to say that that will be the next time there is a nominating convention), there will be many more high-profile Republicans, holding prominent positions in the administration, who will favor changes.
In the long run, strengthening that faction of the Republican Party will lead to its destruction. At some point, the Republican Party could stop being the pro-life political party in America. And if that happens, the party will split in two.
The unchangeable fact is that there will be a pro-life political party in America. It does not need to be a party organized for the sole purpose of advancing the life issues, as the New York Right-to-Life Party is. It is sufficient that opposition to abortion, and the defense of innocent life, be prominent among its priorities. That is what the Republican Party is today.
But when the day comes that those issues cease to be important-and visible, as in the party's platform-on that day the organized pro-life movement seeks a new home. And the Republican Party disappears.
This is not a threat. It is not a promise. In any case, I have no standing within the movement that would make any threat or promise credible. It is simply a prediction based on more than 30 years of observation of the political process at work, and on my knowledge of pro-lifers, among whom I count myself.
To repeat: there will be a pro-life party in America. The Republican Party can continue to be that party, or it can go out of business. The Bush Cabinet appointments have implications for the long-range health of the party. The president-elect has a number of tough interests to balance in making them, but he should not overlook their impact on the long-range outlook of the party that put him-and them-in office.
(Gordon S. Jones is the Executive Director of the Utah Education Funding Project and is a friend of the Free Congress Foundation.)
With less than two weeks remaining in his presidency, President Clinton is still desperately seeking a legacy other than that of being the first chief executive impeached in 130 years, the only one ever found in contempt of court, and just the second at risk of being disbarred.
Let me suggest a real legacy possibility: That this has been the most left-wing presidency in our nation's history. The success of a mostly sympathetic media in portraying his administration as "centrist" notwithstanding, it has from Day One been way out on the left wing:
By Dan Ephron
JERUSALEM - More than 100,000 people marched with blue-and-white Israeli flags into Jerusalem's Old City yesterday to protest President Clinton's peace plan, sounding what may have been a death knell for a deal before Mr. Clinton leaves office.
A top Palestinian negotiator also declared his rejection of the plan, providing further cause for gloom, although Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has not yet announced his final decision.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has accepted the Clinton plan as a basis for negotiations, also appears resigned to failure. In a televised news conference with American reporters yesterday, he said he was ready to unilaterally separate Israelis and Palestinians over the next two years.
Israelis began gathering at the Old City's Jaffa gate in the late afternoon in an extraordinary show of force by the country's conservative camp, which by all signs is set to capture power in next month's election.
The protesters poured into the city from Israeli towns and West Bank settlements to gather before the stone walls of the Old City, many of them wrapped in Star of David flags.
From a stage overlooking the sea of demonstrators, Ehud Olmert, Jerusalem's Jewish mayor, lambasted Mr. Barak in Hebrew for agreeing to cede part of the city, and then switched to English to deliver his message in a language Mr. Clinton would understand.
"We are a nation with long memories that go back thousands of years," he thundered. "We never forgive those who dare to raise their hands against our most precious treasures."
Thousands of police were mobilized on foot and horseback to separate the marchers from the Palestinians, who huddled in small groups in corners where the city's Jewish and Arab sectors meet and waited for the protest to end. "They'll go home in a few hours, but the mess they made will remain," said Mohammed Riad, pointing to a mound of discarded placards and stickers.
A few miles away, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinian officials spurned Mr. Clinton's ideas and said Palestinian demands had been largely ignored.
The speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Ahmed Qurie, said Mr. Clinton's plan was unacceptable because of flaws including its failure to guarantee unqualified Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount - which Palestinians call the Noble Sanctuary.
Palestinians also are deeply troubled by the plan's refusal to allow for a return by Palestinian refugees to homes in what is now Israel.
"We can't accept Clinton's ideas as a basis for future negotiations or a future settlement. Clinton didn't take Arafat's reservations into account, and these ideas don't offer our people their legitimate rights," Mr. Qurie said.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat added that any talks must be based on U.N. resolutions calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the land it won in war and a return of the Palestinian refugees to Israel.
Despite the setbacks, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright insisted during a visit to the United Nations yesterday that the Clinton administration would continue to work for a settlement "for as long as we are in office." She said special envoy Dennis Ross would return to the region today, "and he is going to do everything he can to narrow the differences."
But some Israeli officials predicted that, with an agreement appearing out of reach, the United States would now ask the two sides to sign a watered-down version of the Clinton proposal that could serve as the basis for future talks. That might be the focus of Mr. Ross' efforts, they said.
Mr. Clinton's proposal, a modification of ideas Israelis and Palestinians discussed at a failed Camp David summit nearly six months ago, calls for Palestinians to take charge of the Temple Mount, a site of deep religious significance to both sides, but give up any hope of returning to homes in Israel.
It also proffers Palestinians a state in 94 percent to 96 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza.
Both east and west Jerusalem have been under Israeli control since the 1967 Middle East war. Israel annexed East Jerusalem that year, and no Israeli leader dared suggest giving it back until Mr. Barak offered the Palestinians a neighborhood swap in the talks at Camp David.
The negotiations broke down over minutiae - the very details Mr. Clinton had sought to resolve with his latest proposal. But three months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting in the West Bank and Gaza have intensified the disputes and deepened the distrust.
"Arafat is a genocidal murderer, not a peace partner," read a sign held out by one demonstrator in the Old City who, like most in the crowd, wore a skullcap.
Other speakers summoned history in a way only Jews and Arabs can to validate Israel's hold over all of Jerusalem, including the eastern half of the city where 200,000 Palestinians live.
"Jews were here 1,700 years before the first Arab set foot on the soil of this land," said a rabbi addressing the crowd. "No one has the right to give up any part of this holy city. It belongs to the entire Jewish people."
The remark echoed the position of Palestinians, who say Islamic shrines in the Old City are the property of all Muslims and cannot be subject to compromise. The shrines, the al-Aqsa mosque and the Mosque of Omar, sit on top of the Temple Mount, the platform on which the ancient Jewish Temple had been perched until it was destroyed some 2,000 years ago.
[ THE WASHINGTON TIMES ]
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