Reason Magazine - Staff

Dollar Follies

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

When is a dollar not a dollar? When it costs you $1.40, according to a new study released by the Joint Economic Committee (JEC). If you don't buy that number, try listening to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). He says a dollar is really worth $2.15.

"Hidden Costs of Government Spending," a report released in December by JEC Chairman Jim Saxton (R-N.J.), offers a frightening throwback to freshman economics. It explores in full detail the concept of "deadweight loss," which measures the "hidden" cost of government spending by taking taxation's effect on prices into account. You can link to the lesson at www.house.gov/jec, or skip the gory details and read it here: Every extra dollar of government spending costs the economy $1.40. According to the study, that's because of expensive red tape and the efficiency lost in robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Saxton's report was only one shot in the long battle over how much to spend on stimulating the sluggish economy. Sen. Daschle and friends held a press conference to unveil their own figure. According to these big spenders, every extra dollar in federal spending directed at low-income and unemployed workers would actually boost the economy to the tune of $2.15. The gain comes courtesy of the magical "money multiplier," yet another bad memory for graduates of Econ 101.

So how much is a dollar really worth? That depends on which dead economist you believe. Here's hoping the folks on Capitol Hill come to a consensus pretty soon, however: Any stimulus plan that passes both the House and the Senate will likely be in the billions -- a lot of cash, no matter how you do the math.

Gun Control's New Language

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:00:00 EST

As the new congressional session gets into gear, a freshly invigorated gun control movement is preparing to act. Armed with a few questionable studies, some acid-tongued rhetoric, and vague allusions to the War on Terrorism, the anti-gun lobby is expected to hammer away relentlessly at the capital's most prominent Second Amendment stalwart, Attorney General John Ashcroft. The former Missouri senator should find their tactics familiar: He developed a similar strategy in his own quest for expanded powers against terrorism last fall, and it appears that his very success in that campaign will serve as a road map for gun control.

Give the gun control lobby credit for adopting a model that worked. Ashcroft's success in bulldozing the USA PATRIOT Act through the House and Senate was nothing short of a political rout. Even in the days immediately following September 11, many Americans were concerned that an expansion of federal power would come at the expense of civil liberties. An unlikely coalition that included the American Civil Liberties Union and Phyllis Schlafly's conservative Eagle Forum called for careful deliberation. A band of Senate Democrats, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), promised to deliver just that. By early December, however, Ashcroft had crushed his opposition. Here are the hard lessons his foes learned in that battle -- and are already using against him to pursue their own interests.

Exhibit 1 is the "Use NICS in Terrorist Investigations Act," introduced in December by anti-gun senators including Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.). The measure would force the Justice Department to maintain the records it generates when conducting federally mandated background checks on gun purchasers (the National Instant Criminal Background Check System). Ashcroft has steadfastly refused to use NICS, noting correctly that the records were intended to be destroyed lest they become a de facto national gun registry. But gun controllers argue this policy doesn't even make sense in normal times, and anyway, just look at the World Trade Center! They say federal investigators must preserve and pore over the records that are supposed to be destroyed once a buyer is approved. That way, dutiful snoops can see if any of the hundreds of alien detainees in custody have ever purchased a firearm.

Despite the timely nod to last fall's attacks, the same senators have in fact been trying to use NICS in criminal investigations for years. Take a peek at Schumer and Kennedy's proposed legislation. Section 3 is titled "Gun Sale Anti-Fraud and Privacy Protection." It bears a striking resemblance to the "Gun-Sale Anti-Fraud and Privacy Protection Act" the senators proposed in July. Both bills propose to protect Americans' privacy by making sure the federal government keeps track of how many guns they buy.

Who else has had the gall to rehash old pet projects under the guise of the War on Terrorism? John Ashcroft. In fact, he delivered a masterstroke in this regard. For decades federal law enforcement officials had been clamoring -- unsuccessfully -- for more surveillance, interrogation, and incarceration powers. Enter Osama bin Laden. Now, call it the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act of 2001," and you're in business. How effective was Ashcroft's strategy? In November, The Chicago Tribune quoted an exasperated Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), the only senator to vote against the new powers: "The naming of the bill ...is the kind of cynical game played to intimidate people into not only not voting against it, but not debating it or questioning it." People who hate guns understand how powerful the anti-terrorism angle can be, and they are acting accordingly.

But Schumer and his cohorts have done far more than copy Ashcroft's "cynical game." They have aped his style as well. During the early days of his campaign for expanded power, the attorney general regularly shrugged off a seemingly important question posed by members of the Judiciary Committee: Would such powers have enabled the Justice Department to stop the September 11 attacks? Rather than wrestle with these inquiries, Ashcroft simply admitted that he didn't know, stressing instead that there wasn't any time to ruminate on such trifles. Every minute his department went without the far-reaching new powers was another minute the terrorists had "a comparative advantage."

Fast forward to December 13. In a press release pressuring Ashcroft to keep and use the NICS records, Schumer argued that "every day the FBI is barred from using this information, the investigatory trail grows colder." But is that true? NICS does not keep records on people who purchase box cutters. Accused shoe bomber Richard Reid presumably secured his plastic explosives through someone other than a federally licensed gun dealer. The anti-gun movement has been citing a few studies done by hard-line disarmers at the Violence Policy Center and Americans for Gun Safety. These supposedly link terrorists to guns bought in the U.S., but the fact remains that so far all the damage has been done by airborne goons with ordinary household implements, not firearms. But Schumer, like Ashcroft before him, has no time for such quibbles.

What the anti-gun forces do have time for is overblown rhetoric -- which is perhaps the most important page they have copied from Ashcroft's political playbook. The attorney general certainly set a blistering precedent. Throughout his struggle last fall, he regularly chided legislators, accusing them of stalling and thus hampering his ability to chase down threats to the nation. The rhetoric reached a crescendo in late November and early December, when the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled four separate hearings to question Ashcroft about the administration's proposal for military tribunals, his own refusal to release any information on the hundreds of people in custody, and maneuvers such as monitoring conversations between detainees and their lawyers.

At least that was the plan. In fact, the early hearings resembled junior varsity matches before the big game. Instead of Chairman Leahy vs. Ashcroft, the eager chattering classes got lower-ranking committee members trading flaccid barbs with the attorney general's lieutenants. When the big boys finally took the field on December 6, everyone in Washington tuned in to see the fireworks, only to see Ashcroft turn the tables and deliver a memorable drubbing.

Buoyed by public opinion polls that showed overwhelming support for his policies, Ashcroft went on the offensive. "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty," he said in his opening statement, "my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve." On the issue of subjecting suspected terrorists to tribunals, he simply cracked wise: "Are we supposed to read them their Miranda rights, hire a flamboyant defense lawyer, bring them back to the United States to create a new cable network of Osama TV?" Fully aware of the same opinion polls bolstering Ashcroft, Leahy and the rest of the committee wilted. The only concessions Feingold managed to elicit were an assurance that Ashcroft wasn't referring to committee members in his diatribe and a promise to put a little more thought into the military tribunals.

Live television coverage cut out long before the gavel finally fell on the four-hour hearing, but not before recording a subtle indication that a few of the senators had learned a thing or two from Ashcroft. Instead of nailing him for shredding the Constitution, Kennedy and Schumer scolded him for leaving out the Second Amendment. The morning of the hearing, The New York Times had published an article detailing how Ashcroft had refused FBI requests to open the NICS files to terrorism investigators. Schumer accused the administration of being a "wet noodle" on the issue. Kennedy piled on, and a press release issued after the hearings showed that he smelled blood: The first 10 or so paragraphs deal exclusively with the NICS controversy and -- surprise -- the purported "gun show loophole" that has long been a thorn in the anti-gun crowd's side. Concerns about tribunals and due process violations are relegated to the end.

The next day, Schumer, Kennedy, and friends submitted their NICS proposal to the Senate, recasting it as a tool in the fight against terrorism. Since then, gun prohibitionists around the country have tried their best to match Ashcroft's tough-guy rhetoric. "Ashcroft guns to seal image as far-right nut," snarled the headline of an editorial in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Boston Globe's Thomas Oliphant wrote an op-ed citing "Ashcroft's Gun-Coddling Hypocrisy." A piece in USA Today equaled Ashcroft's own diatribe at the December 6 hearings: "When the next act of terrorism involving conventional weapons occurs, here or abroad, the gun lobby might just be an accessory."

Under ordinary circumstances, Ashcroft could easily shrug off this new clamor by arguing that the proposed measures are constitutionally suspect and would have done nothing to stop the September 11 attacks. Or he could make the point that the anti-gun crowd is dressing tired old measures in anti-terror clothing. He might even gain some sympathy by complaining that the personal attacks levied against him are way out of line. And he would be right.

Unfortunately, the gun control lobby learned its new tactics by watching the master himself pull these same stunts just a few months ago.

Cuban Confusion

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 EST

How well has the decades-old U.S. embargo of Cuba worked? The official story is that the 39-year-old time-out imposed on our island neighbor to the south of Florida has successfully isolated Fidel Castro and friends from the rest of the world. Cuban officials are all too happy to agree: They need someone to blame for the foundering economic conditions that their people face.

A new study by the Cato Institute's Jonathan G. Clarke and the Hoover Institution's William Ratliff takes both sides to task. In "Report from Havana: Time for a Reality Check on U.S. Policy toward Cuba," Clarke and Ratliff detail their recent trips to Cuba and interviews with officials, dissidents, and regular citizens. The authors argue that despite almost four decades of American opprobrium, Cuba has managed to make solid economic ties with close U.S. allies such as Canada and the United Kingdom.

They also show how Castro has failed to harness those lucrative connections by squandering resources on bankrupt socialist schemes. For instance, the report notes that while housing is "virtually free," it is also in extremely short supply, with extended families often packed into cramped quarters. Wages are also a problem, with the average state employee bringing in about $12 a month. According to Clarke and Ratliff, "an attractive lady can earn more in two nights than a state-paid neurosurgeon does in a month."

The report recommends engagement through free trade and allowing private citizens to travel freely between the two countries. (The latter is already happening despite continued restrictions, according to the report. Americans who can't get into Cuba legally through cultural, journalistic, or educational exceptions can easily slip in through a third country.) It also suggests dropping U.S. government support of anti-regime activities within Cuba, especially a proposed Senate bill that would deliver $100 million to Cuban political and human rights activists. Castro's policies are bad enough to fail on their own, say the authors. Removing punitive American policies would rob him of the one thing he needs most -- a scapegoat.

Misunderestimating the Public

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 01 Feb 2002 00:00:00 EST

If you've spent any time perusing the news lately, you might get the impression that the American media are now All War, All the Time. Don't be fooled. Here inside the Beltway, the media continue to scrutinize every possible facet of a topic that even terrorism cannot shake from their minds: the media. Journalists are complaining that outside forces, be they corporate cutbacks or stingy press secretaries, are keeping them from doing their jobs. But if that's so, why is it easier than ever to get information?

Media navel-gazing is hardly new. With so many journalists scurrying about the nation's capital, they naturally get together on occasion to consider how important they are. Before September 11, the typical "media forum" went something like this: A few top-level media types would dream up a topic, set out scones and coffee, network for a few minutes, then launch into an hour of introspection about "the role of the media" in this new era of -- take your pick -- technology/multiculturalism/ globalism/corporate conglomeration/etc. The scones and coffee are still around, but the tone and frequency of these self-examinations have changed dramatically since the terror attacks.

American University convened a typical pre-terror media forum on September 4: "Bush II and the Media: 'Misunderestimating' Each Other?" The title was an irreverent evocation of one of the president's better-known manglings. Panel members included Richard Berke, national political correspondent for The New York Times, David Gregory, White House correspondent for NBC News, and Judy Woodruff, senior correspondent and anchor of CNN's Inside Politics. In the course of the discussion, panelists traded groans over the 2000 election crisis, the new administration's reluctance to share information with reporters, and the public's nagging affection for unseemly stories in the emerging Monica/Chandra tradition.

Fast forward to a November 12 event at the National Press Club. "American Newspapers: Headlines, Bottom Lines and Covering the War" was that night's installment of the Kalb Report Series, a string of forums named for Marvin Kalb. Talk about gravitas: Kalb has over 30 years in the business, serving as a chief diplomatic correspondent for CBS and NBC, and as moderator of Meet the Press. Now he runs the Washington office of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy. Joining Kalb on the panel were such equally serious journalists as Tom Curley, president and publisher of USA Today, Robert Rosenthal, former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, two journalism professors, and a media analyst. There was no misunderestimating this crew.

Rosenthal's presence was especially telling. He became something of a martyr for serious journalists when he quit his high-profile Philadelphia job in early November over a dispute with owner Knight-Ridder. Corporate was concerned about dwindling ad revenue and readership, so they told Rosenthal to cut back on staff. He quit instead. Disputes over the "corporate" drive for profit have long been a thorn in the Fourth Estate's side. The new age of terror has added a bit of urgency to the ranting, however.

Why? It all has to do with "seriousness." Journalists aren't covering O.J. and Monica anymore: There's a war on. Even Geraldo has traded in his pundit credentials for a shot at the front lines. The panelists carped about media outlets that were supposedly caught "asleep at the wheel," having recently cut back on expensive foreign bureaus. Kalb and company readily admitted that the press responded rapidly by pumping vast sums of money and personnel into covering the war. They also said that so far, the coverage has been good. What they wondered was whether the profit-minded bosses would continue to foot the bill. Rosenthal's experience served as a cautionary tale. When Kalb asked his old pal "Rosie" if the influx of funding would continue, he replied that it was "too soon to tell."

I poured some gas on the fire during the Q&A period when I mentioned the palpable change in tone at these forums since September 11. I asked if the panelists thought the focus would eventually shift back to snarky examinations of Bush's creative magniloquence. Tom Wolzien, a senior media analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., LLC, looked me squarely in the eye, intoned the memory of the thousands of Americans killed in the attacks, and said, "Let's never forget it." Kalb agreed, arguing that in this new age of terrorism, "there is no place" for newsroom hacks who refer to the commander-in-chief as "W."

These weighty discussions have not been limited to the National Press Club. In a move that fuses the nation's top academic institution with its most highly regarded think tank, Harvard's Shorenstein Center and the Brookings Institution have launched a weekly series in the wake of September 11: "The Role of the Press in the Anti-Terror Campaign." "We don't usually carry these things through week after week," Brookings Senior Fellow Stephen Hess said while introducing the series on October 31, noting the special attention currently being lavished on such matters.

The first forum, called "Lessons of Wars Past," featured megastars Ted Koppel, Peter Arnett, and Daniel Schorr. (Schorr got his start as a foreign correspondent in 1946; he's now at National Public Radio and still working.) It was full of musings about the proper way to cover a war and the government's stubborn refusal to hand out information.

Schorr reminisced that in World War II -- unlike today -- front-line correspondents wore standard military uniforms. "They were a part of something called the war effort," he said. "They would go and ask, 'Would it be harmful if I reported this?'...That got lost somewhere." Schorr argued that such close cooperation between the military and the press began to deteriorate in Korea and Vietnam as the government tried to more closely "manage" what journalists reported. He said that press relations with the military have "been going very rapidly downhill" ever since.

For his part, Koppel railed at the current administration's attempts to strong-arm broadcasters into keeping Osama bin Laden's video releases off the air, because they might contain secret messages. "I thought at the time, what a totally stupid argument," he said, noting quite sensibly that people who really wanted to see it could find the footage online.

The best exchange of the series probably came at the November 8 forum, when someone asked Army Col. Bill Darley if the military would ever allow reporters to "embed" with Army Rangers on special operations missions. "The short answer, under current circumstances, no," Darley said. After discussing it momentarily, his long answer turned out to be even more emphatic: "At the present time, embedding is out of the question. That's the bottom line."

In some ways, discussions like these are essential. The media must provide people with the information they need to assess the war effort, its aims, and its progress. In other ways, however, the debate is pointless.

While it is appropriate to praise the courage and determination of a frontline press corps operating under very tough conditions, it is far too early to offer more than cursory judgment of the coverage. Weekly panels notwithstanding, this really is first-draft history, and we may have reason tomorrow to revise our view of the stories that we are reading and watching today. We simply have no idea of the full context of the war, much less the stories that reporters may be missing or possibly misunderstanding.

Anyway, the real media story isn't potential cutbacks in coverage; it's the vastly greater opportunities to follow this war than have ever existed. Americans can turn to traditional local and national coverage, both in print and online. But they can also call up digital coverage by a staggering number of sources near and far, including accounts by the British press, the Pakistani press, and even Al Jazeera.

A major complaint at media forums both before and after the attacks has been that the public "forced" journalists to cover such unseemly issues as the Condit affair. CNN's Aaron Brown recently had something useful to say about that. Shortly after the attacks, Brown reported an update in O.J. Simpson's road rage trial. He paused after the report, then looked into the camera. "Oh, for the days," he said, when O.J.'s problems seemed important.

Dollar Delirium

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 11 Jan 2002 00:00:00 EST

Washington's political wags are famous for playing fast and loose with the numbers, but the current flap over budget projections and taxes has taken the fine art of spin to new speeds. It has gotten so bad that nobody even bats an eyelash when congressional leaders complain that swimming in an extra $1.79 trillion dollars is somehow akin to being mired in red ink.

The $1.79 trillion figure comes from Democrats on the House Budget Committee. A few papers reported the dire economic news last Sunday, but Rep. John Spratt from South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the committee, didn't unveil the numbers until Thursday. According to him, the nation is in serious financial straits, and it's because of last summer's tax cut. Sure, the recession has been a downer, and there is that whole war on terrorism thing going on, but when it comes down to it, the tax cuts are what's really going to cost us. Things are so bad, according to Spratt, that leaders might actually be forced to prioritize spending and--sit down--cut back to make ends meet.

But what do politicians mean when they talk about tough times? Nearly everyone agrees that in the short run, the best we can hope for is a balanced budget. Spratt and company predict deficits for 2002. It's in the long run that things get really interesting. Spratt said that over 10 years, the skyrocketing federal deficit will in fact become--a $1.79 trillion surplus. That somehow spells trouble. Take additional funding for new measures against terrorism into account and things look even worse. Spratt moaned that after it's all said and done the federal gravy train would amount to "maybe a trillion at best."

A few of the charts Spratt trotted out speak volumes about the new budget mindset. One particularly glum one was titled, "The Bush Budget Shaved the Projected Surplus to the Bone." Another screamed "The Tax Cut Did the Most to Reduce the Surplus." The New York Times gave everyone fair warning about these numbers last Sunday, with a front- page headline that roared "Huge Decline Seen in Budget Surplus Over Next Decade."

The operative word in all of these statements is "surplus." Sadly, a trillion dollars, give or take a few hundred billion, is not nearly enough money for the programs these legislators have in mind. Spratt said the lean times will be bad news for a new farm bill. The Social Security "lock box"? Forget it. When a reporter asked Spratt if Congress could balance the budget without either rescinding or delaying the tax cuts, he laid it on the line: "Sure, but you'd have to forego other priorities, and that's the point."

It sure is, especially for congressional leaders who had big plans for the 10-year surplus, which only a year ago was projected to come in at about $5.6 trillion. In a much-ballyhooed speech last Friday, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) made waves when he blasted the Bush tax cuts as irresponsible fiscal policy. He didn't argue that the cuts should be reversed, of course, because that would be a tough sell in an election year. Instead, he dropped his bomb and said it was the Republicans' job to clean up the mess. Smelling blood, Republicans immediately went on the offensive to cast Daschle's speech as a call for higher taxes. On Saturday, Bush said that would happen "over my dead body." The Republican chorus has continued ever since.

So Democrats want to pay for a host of new programs, only they won't say they have to raise taxes to do so. Republicans want to cut taxes, but they refuse to talk about cutting programs or admit that the Social Security trust fund is a sham. In fact, the administration has been happy to increase spending on education and pay lip service to wildly expensive schemes such as a prescription drug benefit.

Both sides are wrong. Nobody knows what the surplus--or deficit--is going to be. The Congressional Budget Office, tasked with making these impossible predictions, changes its numbers every six months. If Democrats were honest, they would unveil a proposal to raise taxes to pay for all the goodies they want. If Republicans were truly serious about smaller government, they would put a few federal programs on the block to show what they are willing to sacrifice in order to keep the tax cuts in place--and propose even more cuts to put that $5.6 trillion surplus (or $1.79 trillion, or whatever it is at the moment) back in taxpayers' pockets. This is an election year, however, and it's much easier to crow about the other side's irresponsible economic plan.

Kick in the Crystal Balls

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Mon, 07 Jan 2002 00:00:00 EST

This is the year of uncertainty in Washington. Of course, there's usually a certain degree of ambiguity here, and even when there isn't the horserace-style coverage of the beltway media pretends there is. But this year is actually different; the internal uncertainties of an evenly split Capitol Hill, with its unpredictable voting alliances (remember the one-vote margin in the trade bill?), is matched by an unpredictable economy and an unpredictable war.

That poses a serious dilemma: Foresight is the name of the game in politics, and without it no one is sure how to proceed. On Thursday, a trio of consummate capital insiders revealed the perilous nature of prognostication at a think-tank forum in downtown D.C.: They refused to predict the future. This was no dereliction of duty, however. The country would be better off if the politicians admitted that they don't know what's going to happen next either.

Thursday's forum took place at the local office of the Hudson Institute, a prominent think tank based in Indianapolis. Participants who were supposed to discuss "2002: The Political Landscape," included Michael Barone of U.S. News and World Report; William Kristol of The Weekly Standard; and Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and advisor. Instead of predicting the future with a nod toward their own particular agendas -- a traditional pundit pastime -- all three admitted that the political sands were shifting too rapidly for an accurate take.

"Whatever I say today will likely be wrong tomorrow," Mellman said in his presentation, noting that he had been scheduled to deliver a bit of political analysis to some Capitol Hill clients on the morning of September 11. That presentation was woefully obsolete by the time he reached the Capitol. Barone said that while the political terrain was certainly changed by the terrorist attacks and the lumbering threat of recession, it was impossible to tell how the new war and government's unfolding stimulus efforts might affect voters in the November election. When pressed, he guessed that there is a "50-50" chance that Republicans will take control of the Senate. Kristol was equally vague about the political outlook for November, arguing bravely that, "A lot of that depends on what happens over the next eight to 10 months."

Everyone agreed that congressional redistricting, close calls in recent elections, and a host of other factors make predictions even more difficult. In short, they couldn't predict how the war or the economy would look tomorrow, and even if they did it was unclear how it would affect the elections.

Contrast this humble wait-and-see approach with the attitude prevailing among elected officials. Theirs is often a complex gamble, weighing their sense of legislative cause-and-effect against the actions they think the populace will accept. In fact, the problem with Washington is not only that it thinks it can foresee the future; the problem is that it thinks it can shape the future.

Before the attacks, legislators eagerly took action based on their attempts at economic soothe-saying. This summer, Republican scored their biggest success--the tax cuts--by offering predictions on where the economy was going and the best way to fix it. Democrats, on the other hand, were sure that the cuts would doom every federal program from Medicare and schools to Social Security. Both parties gambled that the measure would score them points in the 2002 election.

This confidence in the power to shape the future has been even more apparent in the economic stimulus battle. Soon after September 11, House Republicans knew exactly where the economy was going -- and how to fix it. They decided the economy was going to need more investment, which they wanted to provide by accelerating the summer's tax cuts and bestowing billions in tax credits upon a few lucky corporations. A few months later, with the economic outlook just as cloudy as before, they changed their tune a bit. This time, they promised economic salvation through more limited tax cuts -- and a few of the spending initiatives floated by Senate Democrats.

For their part, Senator Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and friends have been equally confident in their own predictions. They just know that the economic outlook will still be ugly when the people thrown out of work by the terrorist attacks and the nagging recession run out of unemployment benefits. Moreover, they know that cutting checks for these folks will be just what the economy needs. They even know exactly what effect this spending would have on the economy: At a December 7 press conference headed by Daschle and Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.V.), they said each dollar given to struggling families would boost the economy to the tune of $2.15.

But not everyone is so sure, as evidenced by the restrained pundits this Thursday. The elections will probably depend on the interlocking unpredictability of the war and the economy. Capturing Osama bin Laden could have a tremendously positive impact on consumer confidence. Another terrorist attack could sap investment. If the economy booms, people might give the credit to Bush -- or they might heap praise on Daschle. Which way will it go? Barone, Kristol and Mellman don't know -- and they admit it. With billions of dollars and many lives on the line, elected officials should be at least as cautious.

Hear Dick Talk, Occasionally

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Tue, 01 Jan 2002 00:00:00 EST

One unusual aspect of the war on terrorism is that its most effective propaganda -- on both sides -- has come from elusive leaders holed up in secret locations. They surface just long enough to let everyone know they are still alive, still fuming, and still dedicated to the cause.

Osama bin Laden, for example, is said to be hiding in a cave in Afghanistan. In his few public statements, taped and faxed, he has charted out his goals and tried to rally his followers. To be sure, you have to be one of those fanatics to judge bin Laden's effectiveness, but his presentations are certainly easier to take than the screaming rants of his substitute spokesmen. Bin Laden may or may not be media savvy, but I like to think that his is the best impersonation of Dick Cheney this side of Saturday Night Live.

Cheney is, of course, the other warrior who famously sleeps at undisclosed locations. One of wartime Washington's favorite pastimes is trading rumors about the elusive vice president. Where is he? What is he really doing? Have his four heart attacks, cardiac implant, and stress over the war finally caught up with him?

But just as he's written off as dead, Cheney suddenly surfaces and says more in a handful of public appearances than the rest of the administration has said in weeks of babble. If it's answers you want, Cheney's your man. Sure, those answers are often painfully vague, but at least they're short. He makes you wish that some of the administration's other information-mongers would find hideouts of their own. At a minimum, there would be less confusion.

Take the question of Saddam Hussein. President Bush told the world that countries were either "with us or with the terrorists." But what did that mean for countries, such as Iraq, that were already not with us? A grumpy Washington coalition quickly coalesced around The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, who can't believe that the mother of all humiliated regimes isn't in the crosshairs yet. The frustrated Kristol summed up that school of thought in an October 30 Washington Post op-ed: "No ground troops in Afghanistan; No confrontation with Iraq; No alarm at home. The result? No evident progress so far."

There were early reports that one of the hijackers met with a high-ranking Iraqi official prior to September 11. The plot thickened with the anthrax debacle. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson explained that a Florida tabloid employee got the disease from a contaminated stream. Later, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said the strain infecting his office was especially potent, fueling suspicions that a sophisticated, state-sponsored operation (read: Iraq) must be behind the attack. The next day, a health official called the same anthrax sample "garden variety." More press leaks indicated that the anthrax was super-charged with a special chemical process developed in Iraq. The administration denied it.

Compare this cacophony with Cheney's September 16 one-on-one with Tim Russert on Meet the Press. Russert: "Would we have any reluctance of going after Saddam Hussein?" Cheney: "No." Soon thereafter, Russert asked, "Do we have any evidence linking Saddam Hussein or Iraqis to this operation?" Cheney: "No." His responses weren't any more illuminating, but they weren't confusing. A gaggle of government officials spent two months hinting that we'll blast Baghdad in a minute, but only if we get enough proof to persuade our tenuous international coalition. Cheney said the same thing in two words.

A similar mess has arisen around the stupid question, "How long will the war last?" Since such honest answers as "Who the hell knows?" wouldn't play well on TV, officials have been forced to hedge. The results speak for themselves. On October 17, after an interview with the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Washington Post headline read, "Pentagon: Taliban Forces 'Eviscerated'; Key City Vulnerable to Alliance Takeover." One week later, with "key cities" still firmly in the Taliban's control, USA Today resorted to a bit of creative paraphrasing to lead with the screamer, "Rumsfeld: Bin Laden may get away." Whoa.

Re-enter Cheney. On October 18 he surfaced briefly to address the 56th Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner at New York's Waldorf-Astoria, where he managed to make "Who the hell knows?" sound inspiring. "Americans reasonably wonder, 'How long will it last?'" Cheney said. "The answer is that many of these changes we've made are permanent, at least in the lifetime of most of us. Vigilance against the new threat is not just a temporary precaution, it's a responsibility we all share." Exactly which changes are permanent? What does "lifetime" mean coming from a man with Cheney's shaky health record? These questions require predictions, and the elusive Cheney wasn't about to offer any. It was back to the secret hideaway before anyone could ask.

Yet another sticking point surrounds Attorney General John Ashcroft's decisions to issue warnings about "vague but credible" terrorism threats on October 11 and again on October 29. The administration is struggling to balance the nation's frazzled nerves against the need to say something about what it thinks it knows about terrorist threats. Ashcroft, homeland security chief Tom Ridge, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, and company are vulnerable to the accusation that they are covering the administration's ass in their press briefings. Not Cheney. In a lengthy Bob Woodward cover piece in the October 21 Washington Post, the veep spoke plainly. "You have to avoid falling into the trap of letting it be a cover-your-ass exercise," he said, while stressing that decisions about whether or not to share threat information with the public would always be "tough calls."

Is there a trend here? Yes: If you want to know the latest administration position, you can either stay glued to cable and glean what little you can from the cacophony, or you can tune in once a week to get the latest from Dick Cheney. Neither option tells you all that much, but the latter is a lot more efficient. The well-spaced Cheney sightings seem calculated to provide more than a few simple answers, however. While peppered with plenty of patriotic rhetoric, Cheney's campaign also serves to stamp out stubborn rumors about his health. To battle them, Cheney not only appears -- he shows up in good spirits.

On October 17, for example, Cheney delivered a tribute to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at a posh awards banquet in downtown Washington. Staying just long enough to make his speech, the vice president lightened the mood by starting out in jester mode: "I'm just passing through this evening," he said with a wink and a nod. "I am going back to my, uh, undisclosed..." He was immediately drowned out with laughter, during which he referenced his recent roasting on Saturday Night Live. (The show speculated that the veep was really holed up in a cave in Afghanistan.) Cheney continued the act the following night at the Alfred E. Smith dinner. "It's nice, for a change, to be at a disclosed location," he said, adding, "the Waldorf is a lot nicer than our cave" and "I did not sneak out for cosmetic surgery, although I'm not prepared to rule that out as an option."

Part of Cheney's informational function is to relax a tense public even as he restates administration positions succinctly. Compare his performances to the dodge-and-weave Pentagon briefings, to the sometimes hectoring White House news conferences, to the muddled mess that the public health team has left behind. It might be Washington heresy, but sometimes less is more.

Delicious Irony

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Tue, 01 Jan 2002 00:00:00 EST

Why in the world would an enormous multinational corporation give millions of dollars to pesky anti-globalization groups? It's all about the ice cream.

On October 16, Britain's Financial Times ran an almost humorous piece on how consumer products giant Unilever lavishes piles of cash on vocal street marchers such as Global Exchange, the Ruckus Society, and United for a Fair Economy. The bizarre subsidy began last year, when Unilever took over Ben & Jerry's, the famously left-wing ice cream company. It seems the hippies at B&J mustered one last socially conscious gasp before bolting with the cash.

According to the Financial Times, "When Unilever was courting Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield last year, the Anglo-Dutch group agreed to contribute [$5 million] to Ben & Jerry's Foundation, another [$5 million] for a venture capital fund for ethical start-ups called Hot Fudge, to be run by Mr. Cohen, and a minimum [$1 million] a year commitment to grants for social change groups."

Unilever isn't the only corporate masochist. The Capital Research Center (capital research.org), a conservative nonprofit that studies corporate giving, has found that businesses regularly give huge chunks of change to the very protesters who would bring them harm. In the latest version of its annual Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy, the CRC reports that "corporations like Aetna, Merrill Lynch, Georgia Pacific and Target Stores -- along with many others -- donated $31.7 million to left-of-center groups advocating bigger government, more regulation and higher taxes, vs. only $8.1 million to groups advocating free market solutions, lower taxes and conservative reform."

These numbers are for 1997, the latest year for which numbers are available, but if Unilever is any indication, the pattern is still holding true.

Listless

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 28 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

For Beltway journalists, holiday traditions include much more than eggnog hangovers. With Congress in recess, the administration in hibernation, and almost all of their sources on extended leave, writers resort to the last can in cupboard: the Top 10 year-in-review list. They are easy to compile (get one done on December 23, and you might not have to work again until January 2), easy to read (which is why readers like them), and they give members of the opinionated class an opportunity to shine one last light on their pet cause. Those sensitive to the issue of objectivity will forego making up their own lists, and instead conduct a "reader's poll." Of course, these tactics are a lot less interesting this year for one simple reason: There's really only one story, and the only remaining issue is how you slice it up.

Without that story, Al Gore's still-angry supporters might have put Bush's inauguration at the top of the list to highlight their distress over the 2000 election. Self-styled morality police could have given the honors to the Condit/Levy affair to prove just how sleazy we have all become. GOP stalwarts might have lavished attention on this summer's stunning tax-cut victory -- or blamed all of the year's defeats on GOP turncoat Sen. Jim Jeffords. Such controversial choices would have been rewarded with enough letters from happy supporters and angry detractors to last until the real newsmakers get back into the swing of things.

Not this year. Take CNN's annual "year in review" reader's poll. With 4,580 votes tallied as of Wednesday night, the top choice was of course the September 11 attacks. Number two was the war in Afghanistan, followed by the Anthrax scare. Number four was the failing economy, which was clearly exacerbated by bin Laden and associates. Not until number five does a markedly pre-September 11 headline -- the U.S. tax cuts -- make an appearance.

The national consensus is so overpowering that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution attempted to shift gears altogether on its annual Top 10 list. Published December 23, it came with this caveat: "For most of us, the events of September 11 constituted the biggest 'story' of our lives. So this year, we didn't even seek to rank national and international stories." Instead, readers voted in more limited categories such as Metro Atlanta, entertainment moments, and sports. Despite that effort, terrorism still made it into the mix. Number one in entertainment moments was "the "entertainment industry's response to Sept. 11." Number three in sports was "Sept. 11 postponements and security changes." The fact that a few of the terrorists stayed and trained in the area made an appearance at number eight on the Metro Atlanta list.

A Web site called yourDictionary.com ("the premier global language portal") got heavy airplay on CNN Headline News in the post-Christmas news rut with its annual Top 10 words of the year list. After surveying world linguists, the site says the "top words" of 2001 include: 1) ground zero; 2) W (or Dubya); 3) jihad; 4) God (including variations such as Allah and Yahweh); and 5) anthrax. Number eight is the suffix -stan (as in Paki- and Afghani-). Compare these with last year's now-innocent sounding list, topped by chad and followed by millennium, Y2K, Sidney Olympics, and dot-com.

For one politician, this temporary political consensus has paid dividends. The Gallup News Service, which has been issuing its annual "most admired man and woman" list for over 50 years, gives top honors for 2001 to President George W. and First Lady Laura Bush. The First Couple usually wins, but the numbers this year are staggering. The president's 39 percent score was the highest-ever for a man. JFK came closest in 1961 with 32 percent. Last year, Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II shared top honors with just 6 percent. Commander-in-Chief-elect Bush got just 5 percent. Issued December 27, the Gallup report mentions that Bush's approval rating has not fallen below 86 percent since September 11.

How long can it last? At least until the politicians and pundits get back from their holiday naps. When they do, they won't be rehashing the year that passed -- they'll be predicting the future. This future will include political bombshells such as the 2002 elections, the stalled stimulus package, health care, and of course what we should do next in the war on terrorism. Here's my prediction: When the future arrives in January, today's apparent consensus will revert to the controversy the chattering class has come to know and love.

Walking the Walk

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 21 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

Everyone is talking tough inside the Beltway these days.

Conservatives at the Weekly Standard argue that we need to topple Saddam Hussein--now! Liberals at The New Republic say it's high time we string Arafat up like the terrorist he is. Think-tank desk jockeys from all over the political spectrum endlessly theorize about where we must absolutely send our troops next. In the final analysis, they just might be right--but just who's "we," kemo sabe?

So far, none of the high-profile hawks has traded in his Rolodex for an assault rifle. In private discussions, some of them say they would suit up for battle but cite a host of reasons for staying stateside, including the year-long lag between enlisting and rolling out onto the battlefield (By then, they say, the war might be all over). Luckily for them, a little research reveals that almost anyone can get into a shooting war lickety-split. Here's a blow-by-blow account of how to fight -- if that's what they really want.

Some button-down warriors are reluctant to join up because there hasn't been an official call to arms: But freelancing a war on your own terms is hardly something new. The "Greatest Generation" certainly didn't wait around for Pearl Harbor to suit up. In the 1930s, piles of lefty American volunteers fought in the Spanish Civil War with the famed Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Adventurous Yanks bolted to England to fly fighter planes long before we declared war on Nazi Germany, too.

More recently, about 400 Albanian-Americans formed the Atlantic Brigade and fought as part of the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999. Even monumental screw-up John Walker managed to stumble into the Taliban fold. If his twisted ideals were strong enough to take him abroad, dedication to freedom and liberty will surely lead many more to fight for the good guys.

"Well, sure," the reluctant hawks say, "but I'm too old." Not true, at least for many of Washington's youthfully exuberant. The U.S. Army takes enlistees as old as 35, according to a recruiter I talked to in October. A college diploma even goes a long way toward ensuring that you get your pick of assignments. You can insist on infantry -- maybe even a shot at the elite Army Rangers -- if you really want a piece of the action.

If you're a little longer in the tooth, there's always the French Foreign Legion. Seriously. They'll take you until you're 40, plus you get that sporty white kepi and an optional nom de guerre. Always in on the action, 60 legionnaires arrived in Afghanistan in November. As a bonus, these elite troops are intricately tied to troubled regions in Africa -- people who choose the Legion will probably be within striking distance of terrorists whether the U.S. decides to expand its current war or not. On the downside, the Legion is a notorious home for the world's outcasts, and a book describing the brutally hard Legionnaire life includes a chapter titled "Tips on deserting."

As a last resort, there is always the option of hopping on a plane and wandering around the desert until a sympathetic resistance fighter coughs up a spare Kaleshnikov. It worked for John Walker. In a phone interview this Wednesday, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert K. Brown said that a few gung-ho Americans are already considering this strategy. People contact him about such things because of his Special Forces experience in Vietnam -- and because he's the founder, editor, and publisher of Soldier of Fortune.

"I got a couple of queries here in my office, 'Well, we have a bunch of guys together and we're going to do blah, blah, blah,'" Brown said. While sympathetic to would-be mercenaries' "intent," he is not so sure that going it alone on today's battlefield is a good idea. "You put in with the wrong party, and you'll end up with a knife in the ribs." On the other hand, Brown would not dismiss the idea altogether: "That is not to say that, for instance in Afghanistan, that you couldn't get over there and hypothetically join up with the Northern Alliance or one of the tribes if the situation is right."

For now, nobody in the Iraq-now or down-with-Arafat crowd seems ready to take that risk, and in a lot of ways that makes sense. The war is going well, and nobody in the middle of a promising Beltway career path wants to commit to a three-year hitch (five in the French Foreign Legion) unless they're pretty sure there's a payoff. Even fewer want to test the knife-in-the-ribs theory (hardcore Soldier of Fortune readers notwithstanding).

Still, when people shout that we need to substantially widen the war in Iraq, Somalia, or anywhere else, it's fair to ask if "we" includes them. So far, it doesn't.

Pandora's Lock Box

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 14 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

That infamous Social Security "lock box" is back, and now the question is whether Republicans or Democrats will get caught inside the damn thing. Pure, pre-9/11 partisan politics dogged Tuesday's meeting of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, a bipartisan panel of 16 experts tasked with studying the possibility of privatizing a paltry 2 percent of grandma's favorite federal program. The commission's final report--approved by all 16 members--offers three plans for Congress to consider, and all include partial privatization as a key element. In the coming days, you can be sure that the Democrats will hammer the proposals. But a foul political stench is already emanating from a box that contains more problems than cash.

As usual, the issue comes down to money. The commission's various fixes would cost somewhere between $2 trillion and $3 trillion. Why? At its inception in 1935, 42 workers contributed for every one person drawing cash. Now the ratio is 3.4 to 1 and falling fast. Worse, stubborn old fogeys of the sort who used to die soon after retiring now cash checks for 40 years. Yet if everyone takes 2 percent of what they contribute and puts it in mutual funds, that's 2 percent in contributions that the system must find elsewhere to pay current retirees. Where will the "transition" money to cover that difference come from? Higher taxes? Lower benefits? Other federal programs? The commission's report doesn't say. Instead, it urges Congress to consider its options for a year before deciding such things.

At a press conference after the commission meeting, anti-privatization forces associated with an organization called the Institute for America's Future said the one-year delay was all about politics. Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Calif.) from the House Social Security Subcommittee was featured prominently. "I don't think there is any question that the reason that there is a delay at this time is a political reason," he said. "I am sure that the Republican leadership in the House, and perhaps the Senate, went to the president and suggested that they delay this beyond the 2002 election." Matsui and friends think that people hate the idea of private accounts, and that Republicans will lose the House if the commission's plan sees the light of day.

At their own press conference after the meeting, commission members vehemently denied any such tactics. Co-chairs Richard D. Parsons and former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) said that they offered to delay the report in light of September 11, but President Bush instructed them to carry on. Parsons claimed that rather than shrinking from the issue, Bush told him he would feature it in his January State of the Union address.

Matsui promises to take it to Bush anyway. "He can come to us in a bipartisan fashion in good faith and try to work this out over the next number of months, or else he can make this a 2002 election issue."

But the plan's opponents may find that they too have a weakness: For all their complaints about the plan, they've yet to develop an alternative.

Democrats plan to blast Republicans on the grounds that privatization would require more money now and reduce benefits in the future. I asked the assembled anti-reformers if they were aware of any plan that could overcome the stark reality of demographics without doing one, the other, or both. All I got was some guy from Brookings saying we wouldn't have to worry if Bush hadn't signed this summer's tax cuts. Matsui had no response. A little later, a reporter asked the same question more bluntly: Where's your plan? The fact of the matter is, Matsui doesn't have one, and he admits it. Rather than apologizing, however, he derided the question as "ludicrous."

But it's not ludicrous. There are only two solutions: Add more money or reduce benefits. The commission thinks it can increase revenue through private accounts. That leaves Matsui with . . .well, he won't say. Instead, he cites his long years working on the issue. He was on the subcommittee way back in 1983, the last time the system got an overhaul. "We were able to come up with a bipartisan solution for Social Security, and that's what it's going to take this time," he said. That solution, it's worth noting, included higher payroll taxes and delaying benefits.

Indeed, Bush and Co. could point out that Matsui's last "solution" resulted in the unsustainable system everyone is trying to fix today. One tactic available to the GOP is to force Matsui to him embrace his only option--more money for the program--and make him say where he would get it. Behind the scenes, the capital's reform operatives fear that congressional Republicans will try to sweep the issue under the rug, but it looks like neither Bush nor Matsui are going to let that happen.

Trade Promotion Theater

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Fri, 07 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

Washington performance art reached heights it hasn't seen in a long time this week as the political class played out its first no-holds-barred conflict in months. The subject: Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), not necessarily an issue to keep an audience on the edge of its seats. Even so, it's been a very long-running show.

From 1974 until 1994, the executive branch had the power to negotiate international trade deals and submit them to Congress for an up or down vote, no amendments allowed. Since the White House lost that power, free traders have tried and failed to reinstate TPA. That struggle came to its climax this week, and the result was pretty diverting by recent Washington standards. In the end, Republicans mustered just enough pageantry, passion, and farm implements to push TPA through by a single vote. What that will cost them--and the rest of us--in coming months is still unclear.

The most impressive act, at least in terms of stage dressing, came Tuesday afternoon. Pro-TPA forces transformed a patch of grass at the Capitol into something resembling a barnyard. Congressional staffers fashioned bales o' hay, sacks of horse feed, and rustic-looking barrels of wholesome produce into a makeshift podium. If someone had managed to track down Uncle Jesse and the Duke boys, it could have been a real hoedown. Instead, it was a coalition of TPA supporters pointing out that freer trade would be good for American farmers. Such high-profile faces as Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, Rep. Dick Armey (R-Texas) Rep. David Drier (R-Calif.), and Rep. Jo Ann Davis (R-Va.) had featured roles. The American Farm Bureau Federation and a powerhouse coalition of other agricultural interests were on hand, as were other groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA).

This is the same coalition that has supported TPA for years, of course. This year, some of its members tried to cast terrorism as a walk-on. EIA President Eric McCurdy, for example, touched on the role of using trade to fight terrorism in his remarks, but others wisely avoided making the connection too vigorously. (Zoellick has taken a bit of a thumping for "using" the attacks to further TPA. He published an op-ed in the September 20 edition of The Washington Post titled "Countering Terror with Trade.") Instead, they relied on the same sort of data they've used to push the measure since 1994.

Not surprisingly, other people have data of their own--the AFL-CIO has been predictably ornery. Unsatisfied with old arguments, however, anti-TPA forces had a press conference on Monday to reveal a new reason to be against TPA. Led by Indiana Democrat Peter Visclosky (Vice-chairman of--surprise--the Congressional Steel Caucus), this coalition groaned about developments at the recent international trade talks in Doha, Qatar. There, Zoellick and friends agreed to put America's protectionist anti-dumping rules on the table in future trade rounds. The assembled TPA opponents argued that the move would inevitably push U.S. workers into economic despair. When I asked if any of the panelists supported TPA before Doha, however, there was an odd silence until Visclosky noted that everyone's opposition was, in fact, "a continuum." In other words, Doha had nothing to do with anything. More stage dressing.

It's not that there wasn't any movement on the TPA front before the Thursday vote. In fact, it was a political slobberknocker. The Post, hardly a friend of the GOP, issued a pair of broadsides blasting anti-TPA forces in recent weeks. A November 18 editorial bore the ferocious headline, "Democrats for Poverty." Another, issued December 5, gravely warned Democrats that the vote is "a test of their commitment to America's international leadership, and therefore of their right to claim the political center."

In the end, TPA had far more to do with political hardball than hard facts. Politicians who rely on steelworkers for votes were against it. Politicians whose constituents export tons of wheat were for it. The battle raged over the limited few who were free to go either way. To curry favor, Republicans budged early on labor and environmental concerns. In a last ditch effort this Wednesday, House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) agreed that trade negotiators should insist that trading partners lower their tariffs before we change ours. He also agreed to support Democrat-backed increases in unemployment benefits as part of the looming economic stimulus package. Once the yeas and nays were tallied, these concessions were just enough: TPA passed 215 to 214, with 21 Democrats and 23 Republicans jumping ship. Two independents joined the nays.

It will take a while to find out just what sort of carrots Republicans dangled in order to get the votes. Thursday's Washington Post, for example, detailed the case of south Texas Democrat Solomon P. Ortiz, who said he might roll with TPA if GOP operatives would agree to support more transportation projects in his region: "If they say they can support that, then I might vote for it," he said. Check out the final roll call on the bill, and you'll see him firmly in the "aye" column. Did he get his projects? If so, Ortiz and many others like him will eventually come looking for payback. In Washington's dramas, that's what the last acts are always about.

What Are We Marchin' For?

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

On Saturday, September 29, America's new peaceniks spent hours winding through the tense streets of Washington, D.C., before settling in a telling location -- directly across the street from the International Monetary Fund. It wasn't supposed to be that way. In the days following September 11, anti-globalization forces supposedly shifted focus away from a massive mobilization against the IMF and World Bank annual meetings. That made sense. The meetings had been canceled in the wake of the horrifying terrorist attacks. Moreover, organizers realized that they needed to deliver a new message to a world community inflamed with thoughts of war and retribution. But that message was nowhere to be seen, thanks to an embarrassing lack of direction that plagues the fledgling anti-war movement.

The activists' problem developed early on. On September 20, the Washington Peace Center scheduled a "teach-in" for peace at D.C.'s Meridian Hill Baptist Church. Approximately 250 activists crowded the church's steamy, pink-walled basement, eager to display their anti-everything credentials. They were against war. They enthusiastically hissed whenever a speaker stooped to mention President George W. Bush. Their dreadlocked, multiply pierced heads shook from side to side as they considered such a racist and empire-crazed America. Unfortunately, not one of the five speakers had any suggestions as to what Bush should do.

Rev. Graylan Hagler delivered the most entertaining speech. With a flurry of fire and brimstone, he railed against the U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations conference on racism, and charged that Zionism is in fact racism. These were the "root causes" of the violence -- American arrogance, corporate imperialism, greed, and racism. No wonder they attacked us!

There was an awkward silence when I asked what the protesters were actually for. Sam Husseini, communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, eventually offered a "multinational" solution, noting that a U.N. directive details how nations should respond to terrorism. When I asked if that directive ever mentions the use of force -- or if he supported those sections that might -- the moderator told me I could ask only one question. Michele Bollinger, a self-described socialist who teaches public school, chimed in with the notion that anti-war protesters don't have to be for anything. "I don't think the anti-war movement needs to provide solutions to all the world's problems," Bollinger said to rousing applause. "All I think the anti-war movement needs to do is fight against an unjust war."

As the protesters filtered out to find a spot to watch that night's presidential address to the nation, a perplexed twentysomething asked why I was so dead set on violence. I asked him what he proposed instead. He said we should force the Taliban to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial. I asked him what America should do if they refused. "I don't think they are in a position to do that," he said. "They'll do whatever we say because they are afraid of us." I asked why they were afraid. He did not have an answer.

I expected more from the anti-war movement the following Thursday. Hundreds of left-wing protesters poured into All Souls Church on 16th Street to listen to their academic hero, Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States. After a round of speeches, a few brave souls in the crowd asked the same question I did a week before: If we're against war, what are we for?

Again, no answer. Zinn advocated a course of action -- or inaction -- that doctors take when treating a disease they cannot diagnose: "First, do no harm." He analogized further, saying that when police are searching for a criminal they can't find, they do not simply bomb everyone hoping to hit the suspect. In short, he doesn't know how to bring the terrorists to justice. He just knows how not to do it.

Husseini (he was on this panel, too) argued that the peace movement doesn't really need to offer an alternative because the barbaric Bush administration doesn't want peace anyway. I asked what the plan would be if Bush was amenable to it. Husseini said it didn't matter because he wasn't. I tried to rephrase the question and ask it one more time, but the same moderator who cut me off the week before did it again.

The next day, approximately 10,000 protesters hit the capital's streets for a set of marches all in the name of peace. Or at least they were supposed to be about peace. One, organized by the Anti-Capitalist Convergence, started at 9 a.m. on Capitol Hill and snaked its way toward the White House. Another, sponsored by the less militant but equally vocal International Act Now to Stop War and End Racism Coalition (ANSWER), formed near the White House and marched toward Capitol Hill. The two groups merged for awhile at Freedom Plaza on 13th Street. On Sunday they joined forces at Meridian Hill Park in Adams Morgan and marched into Dupont Circle.

Despite all the marching, singing, screaming, and drumming, a coherent message never emerged. On Saturday, a group of about 50 black-clad anarchists seemed chagrined that the riots they envisioned for the IMF/World Bank protests never came to pass. They sat on a grassy hill next to Freedom Plaza, temporarily lowering their handkerchief masks to smoke pot while the chanting continued on the street. Fewer than 20 people were arrested all day, despite an enormous police presence. Many protesters had traffic pylons duct-taped to their forearms to ward off baton blows that never came, gas masks to protect them from tear-gas that was never used, and goggles to shield them from pepper spray -- which police did deploy in one brief flare�up.

Numerous signs declared "End Wage Disparity Now," as if Osama bin Laden and associates killed 6,000 people because they want a higher minimum wage. One intrepid soul

was handing out "Free Mumia" fliers. Perhaps the Taliban is against imprisoning people for political reasons? Many others blamed the new administration by carrying signs that said "Fuck Bush," which does little to explain the many terror attacks the world suffered prior to January.

Indeed, the weekend seminars sponsored by a coalition of anti-globalization networks show just how hard it has been for the movement to focus on alternatives to war instead of alternatives to the International Monetary Fund. This was the lineup of teach-in topics for Friday: World Bank Bonds Boycott; the New Face of Structural Adjustment and "Private Sector Development"; Jubilee and Reparations; and Legislative, which dealt with congressional funding for the IMF/World Bank. Not much changed on Saturday: HIV/AIDS and Intellectual Property Rights; Labor and Sweatshops; Corporate Globalization and Indigenous Rights; Privatization; Land and Environment; and Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. Not a single seminar focused on finding a proper response to the attacks of September 11.

All weekend, college kids and aging hippies did their best to emulate their 1960s anti-war counterparts, dusting off chants such as "One, two, three, four, we don't want your racist war." In a nod to the peace-loving communes that have sustained the left for generations, there was even a free vegetarian kitchen in Freedom Plaza. Despite the largely successful mobilization of bodies, however, everyone apparently forgot to dream up an answer to the only question that matters for now: Someone attacked Manhattan and the Pentagon. What should we do?

It's not that protesting a war is wrong. People who oppose war in every instance have a right -- even a moral obligation -- to argue the point; so do folks who think fighting in Afghanistan will only make matters worse. Yet this is a different kind of war, even for the protesters. In the '60s you could say things like "make love, not war." Just bring the boys home and it would be over -- the Ho Chi Minh Trail couldn't reach New York.

But Osama bin Laden can. He proved it. People are afraid he will do it again. Saying you are against the war is not enough. People will not listen unless you have a different way to keep terrorists from burning American cities. Given that rescue workers will undoubtedly be pulling corpses from the rubble for a long, long time, protesters should think of an alternative to war before they march again.

Soundbite

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

Abdulwahab Alkebsi arrived in the U.S. from Yemen on New Year's Day in 1980. Within a few years he had graduated from Rutgers with a double major in computer science and engineering and had gone on to get his master's degree in computer science from American University. He also became an American citizen and a political player: He's the executive director of the Islamic Institute, a Washington think tank that "facilitates the development of grassroots Muslim political movements that are economically conservative." reason's Washington Editor Sam MacDonald spoke with Alkebsi a few days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Q: When someone refers to Osama bin Laden, they call him a "Muslim terrorist." How do you respond to that?

A: It's becoming part of the lingo right now. Language is important in these matters, and the language is wrong. Let's call bin Laden what he is: He is a terrorist. It has nothing to do with Islam--just as much as you don't want to call Timothy McVeigh a Christian terrorist or a Christian killer.

Q: Will the attacks make it harder for Muslims to integrate into American culture?

A: The vast majority of Americans accept us totally, 100 percent, as Americans. Let me be very clear. This is the best place in the world to be a Muslim. You have the ingredients to be a true Muslim over here. Being a true Muslim doesn't mean you wear a head scarf, and it doesn't mean you don't wear a head scarf. It's a choice thing, and this is where we get that choice.

Q: After getting over the sheer shock of the attacks, what was your first reaction as the head of an Islamic group?

A: My religion really didn't cross my mind. The first thing that crossed my mind, for all the first day, was as an American. It was shock. It was fear. My reaction had nothing to do with me being a Muslim. Then the reports started coming about the connections to bin Laden, the connection to, in the vocabulary, Islamic extremists, Islamic terrorists.

Q: The Islamic Institute is politically conservative. Is that where most Muslim Americans fit into the political spectrum?

A: It's part of who we are. The sanctity of life is very important to Muslims. The majority of Muslims are also immigrants. A big portion of them are small-business owners who want lower taxes and less government infringement on their business. It's not that Muslims are Republicans. Muslims tend to be conservatives who care about the poor and the elderly, so compassionate conservatism fell right in our laps. It's been a rallying cry, and it's been very helpful.

Walking the Walk

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Sat, 01 Dec 2001 00:00:00 EST

Everyone is talking tough inside the Beltway these days.

Conservatives at the Weekly Standard argue that we need to topple Saddam Hussein--now! Liberals at The New Republic say it's high time we string Arafat up like the terrorist he is. Think-tank desk jockeys from all over the political spectrum endlessly theorize about where we should must absolutely send our troops next. In the final analysis, they just might be right--but just who's "we," kemo sabe?

Still, when people shout that we need to substantially widen the war in Iraq, Somalia, or anywhere else, it's fair to ask if "we" includes them. So far, it doesn't.

Shooting Match

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Wed, 21 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

How bad has the post-September 11 era been for the anti-gun lobby? To understand fully, consider a simple thought experiment:

You are dreaming cozily in your bed when you hear your front door give way with a crash. Moments later, you hear two sets of footsteps thudding up the stairs toward your bedroom. Your first thought is to pick up the phone and dial 911, but you know the intruders will be upon you long before the police arrive. As a last resort, you reach into the nightstand and pull out your .44 Magnum. You thank god that you reached it in time, open the window, toss the gun into the bushes below, and turn to face your assailants unarmed.

Welcome to Self Defense 101, according to the Violence Policy Center. In a study the anti-gun group published this Monday, VPC argues that handguns should be outlawed because they don't work. Or more specifically, they do work: You're just too stupid to figure out how to use one. Seriously.

The 90-page document is titled "Unintended Consequences: Pro-Handgun Experts Prove that Handguns Are a Dangerous Choice for Self-Defense." The report cites all the usual suspects, including numbers that show more people die from gun-related suicides than gun-related homicides. (Message: If you are dumb enough to buy a gun, you're probably dumb enough to kill yourself with it. On purpose.)

In a press release accompanying the report, its author, VPC senior policy analyst Tom Diaz, says, "This study is comprised substantially of writings from pro-gun experts who readily admit handguns are basically impossible to use effectively in self-defense."

The supposed innovation is the report's reliance on usually trigger-happy analysts who at some point during their careers mentioned that if you do buy a gun, you should probably figure out which end the bullets come out before you try to blast a burglar. There is even an appendix that serves as a preemptive strike against anyone informed enough to mention Prof. John Lott's substantial body of work as a counter-argument.

It's not exactly news that some people think that it's "basically impossible" to use a gun to defend yourself. What's more instructive here is to note just how far the anti-gun lobby has fallen, and what a recent spate of setbacks has done to the once-powerful movement. They are no longer simply wrong. They are becoming desperate.

The litany is quite gruesome, really. The disarmament coalition lost its champion when President Bill Clinton squirmed out of office. Al Gore lost the election to a Republican from gun-happy Texas, who promptly appointed John Ashcroft attorney general. Ashcroft soon added injury to insult when he wrote a letter to the National Rifle Association promising to uphold the Second Amendment as an individual right. The thrashing continued in October when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit threw its judicial weight behind Ashcroft's interpretation. Court decisions last fall and this spring that dismissed huge city lawsuits against gun manufacturers certainly didn't help.

These official setbacks pale in comparison to a far more pervasive threat, however: People just aren't so keen on gun-control stories anymore. A National Academies of Science study that could eventually provide a sea change in gun-control laws kicked off in August. Except for a cable news representative who showed up three hours late, Reason was the only media outlet that covered it. Nobody is complaining about a provision in the aviation security bill that allows airlines to arm pilots. There is no talk of gun control in other anti-terror legislation. On October 9, a Washington Post story reported that the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly Handgun, Inc.) was hit so hard by the slowing economy and funds diverted to terror victims that the vocal organization has laid off 14 staffers, a full 20 percent of its workforce. The National Association of Chiefs of Police issued their 14th annual survey on Monday. Over 93 percent said yes to "Should any law abiding citizen be able to purchase a firearm for sport or self-defense?" Over 62 percent said concealed handgun permits would help reduce crime. This caused exactly zero waves on the political or media landscape.

John Q. Public doesn't seem so sure that it's "basically impossible" to use a gun in self defense, either. The October 22 Washington Post reported that in the month following the attacks, traffic at the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was up 20 percent over last year. On October 15, the Los Angeles Times reported that in California, "the number of people buying guns jumped by more than 50% the week of the attacks... and has remained about 32% above the previous year." On November 8, The Dallas Morning News reported that applications for concealed-carry permits in Texas nearly tripled in the two months following September 11.

This explosion in demand is not lost on the fine folks at the Violence Prevention Center. In the aforementioned press release, officials claim that they issued the new report "in response to the reported spike in handgun sales since the September 11th attacks." They accuse the gun industry of using the terror attacks to forward its agenda. If sales are any indication--and if the best argument against guns is that people are too dumb to use them--that effort might be easier than anyone ever imagined.

Justice-Free Zones?

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Mon, 19 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

First, the good news: House and Senate negotiators, now hammering out education-reform legislation, are clarifying a troubling legal ambiguity regarding gun laws and home schools, one that could land gun owners in big trouble if any of their neighbors are home schoolers. The bad news: a similar ambiguity involves drug laws and home schooling, and there do not appear to be any efforts to address it.

The gun-ownership problem stems from the federal Gun-Free Schools Amendment. Passed in 1996, the law requires substantial penalties for anyone who brings a firearm within 1,000 feet of a public or private school. The problem, according to the Tom Washburne, director of the National Center for Home Education, is that 13 states consider home schools to be "private schools." So if Johnny learns at home, will the deer rifle in the closet land the family in trouble with the law? After a few years of scrutiny by groups such as NCHE, the short answer appears to be "no," but the conference committee is not satisfied. The proposed changes will spell it out in black and white. "It's just a clarification," a staffer on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce told me in a phone interview Wednesday. "No one is being prosecuted for it right now."

But this legislative clarification, described in a November 6 press release from the House committee, said nothing about drugs. There is a labyrinth of state and federal laws restricting drugs in and around schools, and they pose the same intriguing question arising from the gun law: Do they apply to home schools?

Why does it matter? There are 850,000 home-schooled children in America. If the parents or siblings of any of these children sneak a few bong hits while the kids are away at camp, they may be liable under the same laws intended for playground drug pushers.

These laws may even apply to neighbors. Let's say you live within 1,000 feet of a home-schooling family. If you get busted with some pot you could be in for a longer trip up the river than you imagined. Similarly, what happens to the unfortunate stoner, pulled over for speeding in an unfamiliar residential neighborhood, when the local constable finds his stash? If it's anywhere near a home school, things could get ugly.

While most of the laws apply to drug distribution instead of simple possession, those definitions vary widely in different jurisdictions. There is a question of notice. Many school districts post signs letting potential dealers know about the stricter enforcement. Would the harsher penalties apply to home-school zones if they didn't post similar warnings? Ask around. I wish you luck. Nobody in the enforcement or reform communities has been able to give me a definitive answer. I asked staffers from the House committee to address some of these issues a week ago, and they haven't been able to do come up with any answers.

So far, no prosecutors have attempted to apply drug-free restrictions to home schools, but anyone relying on continued government restraint needs a lesson in drug-war politics. Drug-free school zones have already resulted in embarrassing "zero-tolerance" gaffes in school districts around the country. Every few weeks a pious principal expels a pre-teen for slipping an aspirin to an ailing classmate. Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation -- a D.C. based institution -- says cops have already shown similarly questionable judgment: "Law enforcement authorities have made busts using drug-free school zone authority along interstate highways. They would stop people and the school is sort of across the highway but is within the 1,000 feet. It occurs to me that in jurisdictions where you have that unusual definition of 'private school' that federal agents might very well use the statute to prosecute and get much longer sentences, or to coerce plea bargains from people by threatening very long sentences."

Again, nobody has done that yet, but nobody has been prosecuted for a gun violation with regard to home schools, either. The powers that be seem eager to clarify that language. Why the different treatment for drug zones?

It's certainly not because they keep Junior safe. So says a study released this July by Boston-based Join Together, a public-health non-profit that explored how these laws have worked so far in Massachusetts. Will Brownsberger, Join Together's criminal justice advisor, concluded that "the school zone statute does not make the areas around schools particularly safe for children, nor can it reasonably be expected to do so." It's hard to imagine that similar restrictions around home schools would be much more effective. It's even harder to imagine a politician stepping forward to make sure that doesn't happen.

Weapons of Mass Consumption

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Thu, 08 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

War is mighty expensive, as politicians are learning anew. To beat Osama bin Laden, we're going to spend heavily on armaments. We'll have to spend millions on homeland security. Oh, and Harry Potter merchandise. Don't forget about that.

Washington is abuzz with the battle over economic stimulation. In typical supply-side fashion, Republicans want to boost spending through tax cuts -- and enormous kickbacks to corporations. Democrats balk at that strategy, urging increased outlays for low-income individuals and more money for unemployment and health insurance. Both sides agree on one thing, however: We better get this money out there fast, so people can spend it on Christmas. It makes sense on the surface, as consumer spending drives the economy, and nothing boosts consumer spending like holiday cheer. Nobody wants a bad Christmas.

One of the first commentators to weigh in on the Yuletide fray was Roll Call's Morton Kondracke. In an Oct. 1 article, he argued, "If consumers don't have more money in their pockets by the end of next month, it's likely they won't spend and help lift the economy out of what indicators and analysts suggest will be a certain recession." This week Kondracke was even more impatient, arguing that if talks stall on a comprehensive stimulus package, Congress should consider a "national sales tax holiday," a bipartisan proposal that would get people's minds off Cipro.

Most Americans would undoubtedly find these arguments compelling -- if they weren't already busy making their lists and checking them twice. While Beltway types have spent the past few months wondering what it will take to make people spend this Christmas, the Consumer Federation of America and the Credit Union National Association had a bold idea: Why not ask people how much they plan to spend? The numbers are worrisome, but far from the Grinch-like predictions that many politicians are offering.

The second annual Holiday Spending Survey gathered buying predictions from 1,019 consumers between Oct. 25-28, late enough to include anthrax fears and worsening news about economic indicators. The result? Just over 25 percent of Americans plan to spend less on the holidays than they did last year. On the flip side, 57 percent of people who responded said they will spend the same amount as last year. And--tickle me Elmo! -- 13 percent plan to spend more this year. The numbers are not all that different those gathered last year: In 2000, 24 percent planned to spend less than the previous year, 56 percent intended to spend the same, and 18 percent planned to spend more. The survey also hints that fewer households are worried about consumer debt burdens this year.

"I was a bit surprised at the modest effect that the events of the last two months or so have had on household spending plans," CUNA's Chief Economist Bill Hampel said at a press conference Monday. "This is a negative report, it's just not as negative as we were expecting." Indeed, 70 percent of people plan to spend at least as much or more than they did last year. I asked what effect any stimulus package might have on the numbers, and Hampel was dubious. "I'm not sure that any stimulus package will have much of an effect on holiday spending. It could [help create] deeper spending into next year, but not so much on holiday spending."

A recent University of West Florida study reported by the Associated Press questions the assumptions behind a "tax holiday." The study notes that while shoppers do save money on reduced taxes, retailers often offset the bonus by reducing rebates and discounts. Hampel did not mention that study at the Monday briefing, but he did express reservations when I asked him about the concept's potential. "I would not expect a strong effect," he said.

Conventional wisdom says that people terrified by the Sept. 11 attacks, bio-terrorism, and sagging economic indicators will be stingy this Christmas. On the other hand, polling results suggest that conventional wisdom might be too pessimistic. Don't get me wrong: If Congress decides to drop the national sales tax, I'll gladly keep the money. If I get another tax rebate before Dec. 25, I promise to buy an extra fruitcake and some egg nog to wash it down. But don't confuse the new Christmas rhetoric with economic reality. These paeans to the holiday spirit are more about trimming politics in Christmas cheer than they are about careful analysis.

We'll all be better off when financial gurus realize that lower taxes -- not temporary macroeconomic gadgets -- make sense all the time, not just during the season of giving.

Washington Worries

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

Washington tried yet again to get back to normal Monday evening. Unfortunately for the people who live and work here, “normal” means that every time local officials make an effort to quell fears, Attorney General John Ashcroft takes to the airwaves to warn people that a terrorist attack—of some sort, somewhere—may or may not be imminent. The result is a local metropolis trying to grapple with its role as national capital.

U.S. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) had called a town hall meeting, gathering emergency, postal, and economic officials to address the shaken city’s questions and to project civic confidence. Over 400 residents packed a downtown room, eager to hear about everything from anthrax to unemployment insurance.

Norton began by trying to focus the city’s attention on tourism rather than terror. She said aloud what many Washingtonians have been worrying about: that the capital’s economy is in serious trouble because people are afraid to come here. “We face a very real danger of a deep recession,” Norton said. “We have got to begin to send the message out ourselves, that this is the safest city in the United States. It is, ladies and gentlemen.” Brave words, considering that Washington’s closest airport, Reagan National, seems to have more security rules these days than flights, and that the city is perceived as much the seat of anthrax as of government.

Tourism keeps Washington going, and the numbers are stark. Testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Tourism on Oct. 12, Mayor Williams indicated that the local economy was projected to lose $750 million over the next 18 months, while city coffers would lose about $200 million. He said half the District’s hotel and restaurant employees are out of work. A jaunt across Capitol Hill reveals virtually empty tour buses. The Capitol lawn, usually teeming with tourists, is deserted.

But most of the locals gathered at Norton’s meeting seemed to be worried about the same things that travelers are worried about: their health and safety. Officials from the United States Postal Service and the U.S. Surgeon General’s office tried to explain to angry postal workers why they had not been tested for anthrax sooner. (The Centers for Disease Control didn’t think they were in danger.) One particularly irate African-American worker drew applause when he insisted that “there is a double standard,” and that “our life is not as important as white life in the Senate.” He demanded that Norton help workers file a lawsuit against the federal government on those charges, a notion that brought cheers all around.

The large contingent of postal workers had shown up expecting to grill Deborah Willhite, senior vice president of governmental relations and public policy at the Postal Service, but Willhite couldn’t make it. She was apparently somewhere else being briefed on the new terrorism warning. Indeed, Norton’s strategy of reassurance was soon eclipsed by the federal strategy of placing the country on alert. “I understand from the press that there has been another alert.” Seemingly peeved that she had to hear about it from reporters, Norton relayed Ashcroft’s warning of a possible terrorist action. “I can’t tell you anything more because I learned it from the press. I know from the last one that we didn’t see any difference, so I have to hope that’s what this alert means.”

The last such warning, issued on Oct. 11, came at an even more inopportune moment for the capital. The Washington Convention and Tourism Corp. had dreamed up an ambitious plan to lure wary people back into town over the October 13-14 weekend. The city’s transit system waived fares, approximately 400 local businesses and restaurants pitched in with steep discounts, and a $200,000 public relations campaign let everyone in the region know about the bargains. Then came Ashcroft’s warning, just two days before launch. “Freebies Fail to Lure Wary Public to Downtown D.C.,” The Washington Post announced in a headline afterward. A spokesman for Washington Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) told the Post, “The FBI's somewhat unsubstantiated alert took the wind out of everybody's sails.”

Washington’s still kicking, of course. A semblance of nightlife has returned to such areas as Adams-Morgan and Dupont Circle; hotels and restaurants are doing better than they were in the weeks immediately following Sept. 11; Reagan National is at least open. People obviously would like to resume their former routines. But an increasing number of Washingtonians simply can’t.

On Wednesday, in the shadow of Ashcroft’s latest alert, and two days after Norton’s attempt to instill confidence, The Washington Post ran yet more bad news on its front page. The continuing slump was hitting the area’s most recent arrivals the hardest. “The sweeping layoffs stemming from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks are taking a disproportionate toll on immigrants,” the Post reported, “and few urban melting pots have been hit harder than Washington.”

D.C. Dispatches

SMacdon921@aol.com (Sam MacDonald) — Thu, 01 Nov 2001 00:00:00 EST

When I arrived at the inaugural meeting of the National Research Council's Committee to Improve Research and Data on Firearms on August 30, I was the only media representative on hand. No CNN. No New York Times. Not even The Washington Post. Too bad. The committee's report, due in two years, could shape the gun debate for decades to come. More important, a few stunning admissions at the meeting reveal an important fact about the body of information upon which America's existing gun control laws are built: There isn't any body of information.

The National Research Council is an arm of the National Academies. In conjunction with the Centers for Disease Con-trol and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute of Justice, and three private foundations, the council has called on 16 academics and other notables from around the country to study gun violence. The participants are mainly doctors and social science researchers, and their charge is four-fold: assess the existing research and data on firearm violence; evaluate prevention, intervention, and control strategies; describe and develop models of illegal firearms markets; and examine how firearms become embedded in a community. If you think someone might have done those things before passing the thousands of gun control laws already on the books, you're wrong.

James Mercy, associate director of research at the CDC's Division of Violence Prevention, detailed for the panel the woeful lack of information that policy makers face, especially on the national level. "We can't answer very basic questions with existing data sources about this problem," he explained. "We can't tell you in almost all jurisdictions in the country what portion of homicides are committed with assault rifles, however you choose to define that term. We can't tell you the number of permanently disabling injuries to the spinal cord and the brain caused by firearms. That's unknown. We can't even tell you the number of violent deaths that occur in schools....There are many questions like these, very basic questions, that we simply can't answer because of the poverty of data that exists in this field. This poverty of data has particularly bad consequences for the evaluation of public policy related to violence. Many of our public policies are targeted at specific types of violence, but we cannot link very specific types of firearms to suicides and homicides with existing data sources."

Officials don't know where crimes occur, how criminals get guns, what kind of guns they use, or how other risk factors, such as poverty or drug use, affect gun crimes. I asked if it was then true that all existing laws were created in absence of this critical information. Patti Culross, associate program officer of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, brought down the house with, "I don't think it's surprising to anyone here that sometimes laws are not based on information."

Douglas Weil, research director at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, seemed to think that ignorance was just fine. "One reason for trigger locks, even if you don't think trigger locks are going to be that effective, is because it is a good way to get people to think about [gun safety]....Maybe it won't be that effective, maybe it will. It doesn't mean there is no logic behind it."

Lois Mock, an analyst at the National Institute for Justice, was discussing how difficult it was to turn good local data into reliable national numbers when she cast doubt on the very idea of national gun laws. "Firearm problems are local," she said. "They differ from one city to another, from one state to another, from rural and suburban areas to cities, even from one neighborhood in a city to another....So there is no one-size-fits-all in terms of a program to intervene in firearms violence."

Here's a topper: Even when there is data, the feds don't always use it. That's according to Dr. Stephen Hargarten, director of the Firearm Injury Center (FIC) at the Medical College of Wisconsin, one of the few organizations with reliable statewide data. He talked about what happened when the Clinton administration started its campaign against assault weapons. First it turned to the CDC and The Johns Hop-kins University. But when they couldn't find numbers on assault rifle deaths, the administration turned to the FIC. Hargarten said he told the feds that short-barreled pistols were a much bigger problem, at least in Wisconsin. "Did that inform the subsequent political discussion?" he told the panel. "No....The assault weapon ban was so much hot air."

So what now? The committee will try to pull together all the best data from around the country and devise ways to mesh it together. Critics have argued that the scholars selected for the committee and the private foundations partially bankrolling it all but guarantee an anti-gun report. On the other hand, the committee did hear from a National Rifle Association spokesman, and there was some talk of trying to calculate the benefits of gun ownership along with the costs. Let's hope the numbers the committee cooks are fair -- two years from now they will be the only numbers anyone has. Remember, we got thousands of laws when there weren't any numbers at all.

Washington wanted a few words with Attorney General John Ashcroft the first week of September, but nobody could find him. Some fellow Republicans wanted to upbraid Ashcroft, and not simply for losing last year's Missouri Senate seat to a dead Democrat. Rep. Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican who is chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, was upset about the Department of Justice's failure to prosecute a variety of criminal cases.

Burton, perhaps best known for shooting up watermelons in his backyard as a way of investigating the Vince Foster suicide (don't ask), wants to examine DOJ documents. Ashcroft won't produce them, and Burton is so mad that, at a September 6 hearing, he actually compared Ashcroft to Janet Reno. (Coming from Burton, that's even more of an insult than when he famously called President Clinton a "scumbag.") Ashcroft wasn't there to accept the abuse, but a civics-minded DOJ spokesperson did tell The Washington Times that "the oversight responsibility of Congress is fundamental to the constitutional system of checks and balances."

The scoldings were bipartisan. Just the day before Burton's hearing, the nation's top cop was called before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), to answer charges that he has been pussyfooting on a gargantuan federal lawsuit against the tobacco industry. Ashcroft sent someone else to take the heat. So where was he? Well, he told the Judiciary Committee that he'd be busy with yet another hearing, one already scheduled by the Senate Intelligence Committee. But Intelligence cancelled its hearing, so we can only speculate about Ashcroft's whereabouts.

One guess involves Microsoft. On September 6, the DOJ announced its decision to abandon the Clinton-era effort to break up the giant software company. So was Ashcroft spending the day before in depressed seclusion at the prospect of a big one that got away? Probably not. Maybe he jetted to Redmond to drink champagne with Bill Gates? Equally unlikely.

Durbin knew perfectly well that Ash-croft wouldn't be present, but nevertheless delivered a tongue-lashing. The Illinois Democrat has been saving Americans from themselves since 1987, when he penned legislation banning smoking on short-distance commercial flights. At issue in the hearing was a 1999 federal case that the Clinton administration filed against the industry. Just as the breakup of Microsoft was made unlikely by a court decision, two-thirds of the Clinton anti-tobacco case -- the parts attempting to recoup billions in health care costs -- have already been thrown out of court.

However, the best part of the lawsuit remains: Durbin wants to go after Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, legislation designed to help the federal government squash organized crime. A favorable ruling would allow the court to demand a "disgorgement" of the industry's ill-gotten gains. That would let the government seize tobacco companies' assets the same way it can seize a drug dealer's car. There are literally billions of dollars at stake, and Durbin is not convinced that Ashcroft shares his anti-tobacco enthusiasm.

This piece of political theater went on for two hours. "The Department of Justice's management of this case seems unprofessional at best," said a steamed Durbin. "At worst, they are killing this lawsuit and don't have the political courage to admit it publicly....The American people deserve their day in court, but even more importantly, they deserve competent and committed legal representation."

Harsh words. No doubt Ashcroft would have responded effectively had he been there. Where was he? Could it be true that he was laying a wreath at a Confederate memorial across the Potomac? Surely not. Acting Assistant Attorney General Stuart Schiffer was present in Ashcroft's stead. He cited the 26 government attorneys and eight staff members working on the case full time, and mentioned plans to add four more bodies. He said the effort cost the feds $23.2 million this fiscal year, and that he expects to ask for more than $40 million for fiscal year 2002. That should make us all feel better.

After Schiffer left, Durbin staged Act II of his melodrama. He trotted out another panel, including a woman who blamed the tobacco industry for the emphysema that came 40 years into her life as a smoker. A representative from the Clinton-era Department of Justice detailed how diligently he had sought funds for the case on his watch. Two legal scholars later debated the wisdom of using the judiciary to attack the tobacco industry. Ashcroft wasn't there to hear any of it. Could he have been tied up with the Washington visit of Mexican President Vicente Fox?

Actually, yes. Ashcroft's office says that's just how the attorney general spent the day, but that's all the details I got from his staff. Given how many frustrated lawmakers were lined up to talk to Ashcroft, whoever he met with at the White House was singularly fortunate. As for what Ashcroft spent the day talking about, well, never mind. Maybe he talked to Mexican officials about amnesty for illegal aliens. Or maybe they discussed browser bundling. Or maybe they snuck out to the Rose Garden for a quick smoke. After all, it had been a pretty intense week for everyone.