The reason the Palestinians have not adopted these alternatives is because they actually want to win their independence in blood and fire. All they can agree on as a community is what they want to destroy, not what they want to build. Have you ever heard Mr. Arafat talk about what sort of education system or economy he would prefer, what sort of constitution he wants? No, because Mr. Arafat is not interested in the content of a Palestinian state, only the contours.

Let's be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.

Gov. Gray Davis received an additional $251,000 from California's prison guards union earlier this month, only weeks after the governor granted the officers a pay hike of as much as $1 billion and fulfilled their wish by proposing to close five private prisons.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn.'s donation, dated March 13, is the largest single check Davis has received since taking office in 1999, though three other donors have given lump sums of $250,000.

With the latest check, the union has contributed $306,000 directly to the Democratic governor, plus $356,000 through the union's "Governor's Cup" golf fund-raisers at Pebble Beach.

Union President Don Novey said that despite the donation, the guards haven't decided whether to endorse Davis or Simon in this year's campaign. He would not specify why the union made the latest donation, except to say there was no connection between the money and the governor's recent actions.

"That had nothing to do with it, but I guess it would be good cannon fodder," Novey said, adding that though Davis often inquires about donations, the union's executive board made the decision about the amount and timing.

There was only one man I wanted to meet that night, and he turned out to be, in my eyes, the great man of the evening. I saw him across the room at a round, white table talking to Mel Brooks. During the milling-about time between courses I went over to thank him for his excellence. Soon I was standing near him and seeing him in the bright lights--a smooth, black tuxedo on a not-so-broad back. He turned toward me; I introduced myself and asked if I might shake his hand. He smiled and said sure--I was later to find out this was amazing behavior on his part--and we talked for a few minutes about the party and about politics. I left feeling I'd just met a wonderful American man.

Later I found out that he too had done something interesting at the dinner. He had been assigned by the editor of Time to sit at the table of the president of the United States, Bill Clinton. When he saw where his place card had been put, in this place of honor, he ordered it moved, because he didn't want to sit at a table with a man like that.

And here's to you, Joe DiMaggio. He married a movie star half a century ago but the one thing he seems not to have liked about Marilyn Monroe was that she was a star. And that night he refused to sit with the biggest political star in the room. Joe DiMaggio trumped movie-stardom. But Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.

I'm continually drawn to the similarities between Chamberlain's 20th Maine and Flight 93. Chamberlain was asked to hold Little Round Top against horrible odds; the heroes of Flight 93 were asked to take control of the cockpit from armed, professional killers. When they ran out of ammunition, Chamberlain's men fixed bayonets and charged blindly down the hill; the unarmed heroes of Flight 93 had to storm up a small three-foot-wide aisle. Chamberlain's men held their ground and changed the outcome at Gettysburg; the heroes of Flight 93 succeeded and saved the Capitol.

[I]n a way, it's a shame that so much of David Brock's "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative" is about the private lives of our self-appointed moral guardians. Those tales will sell books, but they may obscure the important message: that the "vast right-wing conspiracy" is not an overheated metaphor but a straightforward reality, and that it works a lot like a special-interest lobby.

Modern political economy teaches us that small, well-organized groups often prevail over the broader public interest. The steel industry got the tariff it wanted, even though the losses to consumers will greatly exceed the gains of producers, because the typical steel consumer doesn't understand what's happening.

"Blinded by the Right" shows that the same logic applies to non-economic issues. The scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics — men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cultlike Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises. It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on.

The group's efforts managed to turn Whitewater — a $200,000 money-losing investment — into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons. Just imagine what the scandal machine could have done with more promising raw material — such as the decidedly unusual business transactions of the young George W. Bush.

But there is, of course, no comparable scandal machine on the left. Why not?

One answer is that for some reason there is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics.

It's also true that in the nature of things, billionaires are more likely to be right-wing than left-wing fanatics. When billionaires do support more or less liberal causes, they usually try to help the world, not take over the U.S. political system. Not to put too fine a point on it: While George Soros was spending lavishly to promote democracy abroad, Mr. Scaife was spending lavishly to undermine it at home.

Regular readers of this column know that not long ago I found myself the target of a minor-league smear campaign. The pattern was typical: right-wing sources insisting that a normal business transaction (in my case consulting for Enron, back when I was a college professor, not an Op-Ed columnist, and in no position to do the company any favors) was somehow corrupt; then legitimate media picking up on the story, assuming that given all the fuss there must be something to the allegations; and no doubt a lingering impression, even though no favors were given or received, that the target must have done something wrong ("Isn't it hypocritical for him to criticize crony capitalism when he himself was on the take?"). Now that I've read Mr. Brock's book I understand what happened.

Paul Scott's complaint, filed last month, alleges discrimination and intolerance of him and his daughter by "not addressing a very clear right of privacy violation that requires my child to share restrooms, dressing rooms and showering facilities with those who by their own, and societies (sic) definition, are attracted to the same gender (homosexual students and staff)."

A FEW WEEKS ago, when the House was voting on campaign finance reform, presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer was ready to give President Bush credit for creating the climate that gave reform its first real chance at passage. But there wasn't any chest-thumping at the White House yesterday when the president signed the landmark measure into law. At least we guess there wasn't, but we couldn't really see, because Mr. Bush chose to act quickly and quietly, in the privacy of the Oval Office. If that meant, for the president's good friend Sen. John McCain and his fellow reformers, no signing ceremony, no souvenir pens and no celebration to mark the culmination of years of dogged pursuit of reform legislation -- well, the president's a busy man.

Who says he's a sore loser? Who says he just couldn't give John McCain his moment in the Rose Garden, a ceremonial signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill? Who says he would rather look petty than go through the gripping and grinning and pen-handling that a White House ceremony entails?

[S]uch a coincidence! With the U.S. Senate debating so-called "therapeutic cloning" to produce embryonic stem (ES) cells and other countries, such as Canada, suffering similar political agony, Nature magazine releases letters from two research teams saying that the alternative — so-called adult stem cells — may be worthless.

Nature was so eager to get the news out that it even published the letters online, before the print edition. Both letters attack the "supposed flexibility" of NES cells, as one reporter put it. And the world media swallowed it like a starving mouse downing a chunk of cheddar.

Whether or not we invade Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, let's go about this the American way. Let's sue him. [I used to think that shooting people was the American way, but now that I'm a New York liberal, I changed my teensy-weensy mind.]

The United States should launch an effort to prosecute Saddam for crimes against humanity. [I was binging on heroin, Johnny Walker and on old The Nation magazines, so no one should be surprised that this idea would come to mind.] This would destabilize his regime at home, encourage more defections of Iraqi officials and military officers, and increase the prospect of a coup that, in the best-case scenario, would render an invasion unnecessary. [You know, nothing is scarier to me than a lawsuit, except maybe a gun. Yeah, a lawsuit about guns. A lawyer with a gun? I just know that if I were the despotic ruler of a middle-eastern country who maintained power for decades through murder, genocide and intimidation, I know a lawsuit would make me lose control of my bowels.]

I came across this idea in references in books by Richard Butler, who led the [failed] United Nations inspection effort in Iraq, and by Kanan Makiya, author of the leading account of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. [I know this because it said so on the bookcover.] It also turns out that a British organization, Indict, is already pursuing an indictment against Saddam for war crimes. [You see, he's already quaking in his boots.]

Mr. Makiya writes that the best way to topple an Iraqi leader is to make him lose face. [Preferably the back of his skull too, from a very large bomb.] As an example, he cites the Ottoman-era practice of the people of Takrit (Saddam's hometown) of seizing the governor for the area, humiliating him (often by sexually abusing his women) and then releasing him unharmed. [Did I just write that? Ooops....I'm going to have NOW after me any second now....must...retract...]

I would not recommend this precise approach. [Whew!] But a drive to indict Saddam for genocide against the Kurds, along with other crimes, suggesting that he will end his days in a prison cell, will humiliate him in a similar way, squeezing him and encouraging those around him to look for an exit while there is still time. [Of course, anyone heading for the exits will probably be shot, but that's OK...death is an exit after all.]

"In Washington, you either have the war hounds who want to bomb Iraq and take Saddam out, or the folks who just want to contain Saddam because at least he keeps Iraq together," said Joost Hiltermann, who has examined 18 tons of Iraqi documents seized in Kurdistan and brought to the United States, and who is now writing a book about Iraq and its use of chemical weapons. "But there is a third option" — a legal case, with or without a military attack. [Of course, if the legal case is delivered by a process server and contains 10 pounds of C-4...]

(Along with those 18 tons of documents were audio tapes of speeches by Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam and his former lieutenant for northern Iraq. In one tape he says of the Kurds: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons!") [Ooohhhh! Irrefutable evidence....now we've got 'em!]

The Bush administration is interested in the idea of prosecuting Saddam, and it has two lawyers sitting in the State Department gathering evidence against him. [The lawyers were working on the Clinton pardons, but I think this is a much better use for your tax dollars.] But the thinking there has been that the prosecution would begin after Saddam is in custody, rather than before. [Of course, they'd never kill Saddam instead, that would be in violation of the Geneva Convention....I think.]

Why? An administration official, acknowledging that there may be advantages to a pre-emptive indictment and adding that no decision has been made, expressed concern that a legal effort might distract from the task of "regime change," a term that means "squash Saddam like a bug." [I wish I could come up with such clever analogies like real writers can.]

It's a fair concern. But in Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic was indicted when he was still in power, in 1999. The indictment was one factor that helped result in his ouster from power in 2000. [Some people say it was the fact that we bombed the crap out of his country, but they'd be wrong.] And in 2001 he was sent to The Hague for trial.

In short, firing lawyers at Saddam would bolster our military options, not weaken them. [I'm serious, we have plenty of lawyers. We could them in some of the big 16-inch guns...a direct hit using a trial lawyer would certainly be deadly.]

One of the constraints that Washington faces in organizing an attack on Iraq is cold feet everywhere else on the planet (except those under Tony Blair). [Tony uses thermal socks.] To forge a coalition against Saddam, we must build a case against him very publicly to demonstrate that he is not just another two-bit tyrant but a monster almost without parallel in recent decades. [We could use the media for this.]

Police in other countries use torture, but there are credible reports that Saddam's police cut out tongues and use electric drills. [Of course, people use them here too.] Other countries gouge out the eyes of dissidents; Saddam's interrogators gouged out the eyes of hundreds of children to get their parents to talk. Plus, he has tons of VX gas and defies the U.N. [That's the most incredible crime in the world, defying the U.N. Anyone who defies the U.N. should be shot, including most Republicans. Actually, maybe we should put Sen. Jesse Helms on trial first, just to get the kinks out.]

There are three ways we can pursue legal action against Saddam:

• An international tribunal can be established, like the one now trying Mr. Milosevic. This would require Security Council approval, which would be difficult.

• Several countries could launch a case before the International Court of Justice, without Security Council agreement. This would be against Iraq as a country, not Saddam as a person.

• An individual country could indict Saddam. This would be a country claiming universal jurisdiction in genocide cases.

Now's the time. Let's throw the book at Saddam. [But first, make sure it's packed with explosives]

Only the Supreme Court can end the charade. When it considers McCain-Feingold, it should declare most campaign finance regulation unconstitutional. The alleged evils of money in politics are now overshadowed by the evils of strangling free speech.

The United States should launch an effort to prosecute Saddam for crimes against humanity. This would destabilize his regime at home, encourage more defections of Iraqi officials and military officers, and increase the prospect of a coup that, in the best-case scenario, would render an invasion unnecessary.

Let me tell you, I fund and work for an adoption agency. And we have many cases, and you can call them and get the statistics, when we have a birth mother who is pregnant and she doesn't know the race of the father, she is using drugs and she is in crisis. Usually we cannot place that baby with a heterosexual family. Almost all of the times when we have a drug-addicted child, we place the baby with a homosexual family.

"These lawyers — and they are some of the finest legal minds in America — know that this is basically a frivolous lawsuit that will not succeed, but to the extent that they can stir the pot and get us to talk about this and maybe create this fund for scholarships and maybe get an apology from Congress, they will have accomplished their purpose," Napolitano said.

"This is asymmetrical warfare, and it would be a prudent force-protection measure," said a U.S. official close to the debate.

The money obtained from Afghanistan's poppy harvest will fuel the guerrilla war that is expected to escalate against U.S. and allied forces in the coming months.

The money from the poppies also will bolster anti-U.S. elements in the Pakistani ISI intelligence service, the officials said.

"If this opium is harvested and permitted to go to market, it will re-empower the negative elements in Pakistan's security service and lead to instability in Pakistan," the official said. "And it will fund a new round of international terrorism."

SANTA CRUZ — Years of latent frustration in the clown community broke through the surface Saturday afternoon as a tide of bulbous noses, tri-colored wigs and oversized pants swept down Pacific Avenue.

Some 80 normally jolly clowns, supported by the buzz of a dozen kazoos, sought to make their plight public and turn the fortunes of clowndom toward a brighter future.

"You are born a clown," said organizer Rico Thunder. "And for those brave enough to be out as clowns, the world can be a cold and unwelcome place."

"As long as one clown is oppressed, no man is free," Thunder continued.

Real terrorists don't want to kill a lot of people. Rather, they use limited, but indiscriminate, violence or hijacking to create noise or fear that draws attention to their cause and ultimately builds political or diplomatic pressure for a specific objective.

That's why Osama bin Laden is not a mere terrorist. He has much larger aspirations. He is a super-empowered angry man who has all the geopolitical objectives and instincts of a nation-state. He has employed violence not to grab headlines but to kill as many Americans as possible to drive them out of the Islamic world and weaken their society. That's why the Sept. 11 hijackers never left a list of demands, as terrorists usually do. Their act was their demand. Their demand is total victory.

Since that is the case, the proper, long-term U.S. strategic response to Sept. 11 should be twofold: First, we must understand exactly who these 19 suicide bombers were and how they were recruited. We need to know how these human guided missiles are assembled. Second, we need to launch an all-out global effort to make sure that all nuclear and biological warfare materials are under as tight a control as possible.

What worries me most for my daughters' future is not Saddam Hussein. He's a homicidal dictator who can be deterred, or eliminated, by conventional means. No, what worries me most is the fact that we still don't understand who those 19 hijackers were. What worries me is that nearly every day for the past six months, Palestinian men and women — many of them secular, not religious — have strapped dynamite around their waists and blown themselves up against Israeli targets. How do you deter young people who hate us, or Israel, more than they love their own families or their own future?

It will take us a long time, and much diplomatic therapy, to cure such intentions.

Nor can Mr. Bush be claimed by the culture warriors of the Christian right, although he gave them John Ashcroft and occasionally throws them a steak. The president is not a bigot, or a pessimist.

EMBARRASSING ADMISSIONS: Officially, University of Michigan Regent Dan Horning supports affirmative action. But at a time when the university's race-based admissions are under two separate court challenges, he confessed in a letter to a fellow regent that he didn't think "our admissions policies will withstand this legal challenge and I certainly don't feel they are based on merit." The Michigan Daily reports that he went on to write that the policies keep qualified students out while letting less qualified minorities in. As per custom on campuses these days, Mr. Horning has now apologized for his outburst of candor.

Walid el-Batouty, the co-pilot's nephew and spokesman for the families of the Egyptian victims, disagreed with the report's conclusion.

``We are not giving this report any consideration as it is not based on fact. The Americans still have to prove the suicide theory,'' he said. ``It was very clear from the beginning that all the Americans cared for was to protect their interests, such as Boeing's interests.''

EgyptAir's chief official investigator objected to the NTSB findings and called for a reopening of the American investigation.

``We want the Americans to reinvestigate the case as they have not considered several points presented by Egyptian investigators'' including proper checks on the plane's tail, cockpit voice recordings and radar and flight control data, Mohsen El-Messiri told reporters in Cairo.

The teen's story began on a Sunday afternoon with him and his father packing linens, books and kitchenware that had belonged to his ailing grandmother. At sunset, Hess and his father delivered a truckload of boxes to Goodwill Super Store in Hurst.

The next morning at school, Hess was removed from class. A school security guard had seen a nonserrated bread knife with a 10-inch blade in the bed of the teen's pickup. It must have fallen out of one of the Goodwill boxes, Hess explained.

But the H-E-B district's Student Code of Conduct - which Hess and his mother, Gay Hess, both signed - prohibits students from bringing weapons onto school grounds. "This is a serious offense," Taylor Hess was told by school officials.

At the end of the three-hour meeting, school officials told Hess that his action posed a threat to his fellow students. Four days after the hearing, he was expelled.

H-E-B district officials maintained throughout the Hess hearing that students' safety must be the overriding factor in any situation where a weapon is found on campus.

"I do feel he [Hess] put students at risk, whether he knowingly did that or not," Dianne Byrnes, H-E-B director of alternative education programs, said at the hearing.

Just before the beginning of this school year, the Bristol Township School Board in Pennsylvania decided that students with asthma must keep their emergency inhalers in the school office, rather than on hand.

On September 7, the board received a letter from Nancy Sander, executive director of the Allergy and Asthma Network/Mothers of Asthmatics (AANMA), a national asthma support and education group based in Fairfax, Virginia. Sander’s letter neatly encapsulated the all-too-common frustration of parents when their doctor’s advice about how to care for an asthmatic child encounters a school with an entrenched hall-monitor mentality. The letter read, in part:

"The decision to accommodate and facilitate a child’s needs with asthma is far easier than pretending their needs do not exist or that restricting student access to medications is for the safety of all students. To do so places your students with asthma at greater risk of death or missed school days, their classmates at risk of witnessing their death, and your school board at risk of lawsuits....

"If a student placed a plastic bag over a teacher’s head for a brief moment, the student would be charged with assault. But a school board voting to restrict a child’s access to his life-saving asthma medication is no less guilty of a crime. Is Bristol Township School Board really ready to accept responsibility for violating a child’s right to breathe? Are you prepared to breach the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act?"

Three days later, the school board held a hearing and reversed its original decision. Students in Bristol Township are now allowed to retain control of their asthma inhalers.

One day when in the fifth grade, however, she was in tears when I picked her up from school. The teacher had yelled at her when she’d used the inhaler in class, claiming that she didn’t really need it.

I spoke to Ivanhoe’s then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I’d been "breaking the law" for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would "confiscate" it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. "So now what we need to do," he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, "is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law." My arguments about doctor’s orders went nowhere. "When your daughter is at school," Principal Baker said, "I am the ultimate authority concerning her health."

That Robert De Niro soundbite from The Untouchables that Howard Stern likes to play -- "I want him dead! I want his family dead!" -- kept echoing in my head as I left the school office. But I’d heard enough misinformed pronouncements over the years from that school -- a jellyfish is a mollusk, "Indian" should be spelled with a small i -- to consider the possibility that the principal didn’t know what he was talking about. So I went home and called the Los Angeles Unified School District’s director of nursing. Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker’s desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly.

In her letter to the Bristol Township School Board, Nancy Sander referred to the 1991 death of a New Orleans high school student, Catrina Lewis, who was delayed by security guards before being allowed to get her inhaler from the office. When it didn’t help, she asked school staff to call an ambulance; instead they spent a half-hour trying to call her mother first. Catrina’s sister, another student, finally called 911 herself, but emergency help arrived too late. In 1996, a New Orleans judge ordered Lawless High School’s acting principal, a school counselor, and the school board to pay $1 million in damages to Catrina’s family.

During the hearing, Short, the L.D. Bell principal, described Hess as "an exemplary student" and said the expulsion was a difficult decision.

"Zero tolerance makes you feel you lose your judgment you might otherwise be able to afford," Short said on the tape.

But there's abundant evidence that having more handguns also means more gun thefts, more armed robbery, more suicide and more murder.

Japan, where I used to live, allows only about 50 people (all leading target shooters) to own handguns, and while criminals do smuggle them in, there were only 28 gun deaths (murders and suicides combined) in 1999, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, the United States had 26,800 gun deaths in 2000.

Lott's sources are broad and inclusive, and his evidence the most extensive yet assembled, taking full account of the FBI's massive yearly crime figures for all 3,054 U.S. counties over eighteen years, the largest national surveys on gun ownership, as well as state police documents on illegal gun use. His unexpected findings reveal that many of the most commonly held assumptions about gun control and its crime-fighting efficacy are simply wrong. Waiting periods, gun buybacks, and background checks yield virtually no benefits in crime reduction. Instead, Lott argues, "right to carry" laws and legally concealed handguns currently represent the most cost-effective methods available for reducing violent crime.

In what may be his most controversial conclusion, Lott finds that mass public shootings, such as the infamous examples of the Long Island Railroad by Colin Ferguson or the 1996 Empire State Building shooting, are dramatically reduced once law-abiding citizens in a state are allowed to carry concealed handguns.

Friday June 30, 2000

Japan Suicide Rate Clings Near Record High

TOKYO (Reuters) - In November last year, an unemployed Japanese factory worker drove his car into the sea near Tokyo, taking his life as well as those of his wife and three young children.

This incident was far from isolated. Statistics show that more than 30,000 Japanese killed themselves last year--the second highest figure on record, and a grim sign that social and economic turmoil still rocks a nation once known for stability.

SUQ AL-TALH, Yemen — Want to buy a submachine gun?

This little market town in the wild, wild north of Yemen has more than 50 shops selling all kinds of toys for boys. A used Uzi goes for $170, a machine pistol with silencer is $350, and a brand-new AK-47 assault rifle goes for nearly $400.

Grenades are $4 each. An antitank mine is $22. A rocket-propelled grenade launcher is $500. An arms merchant I met here might even be able to find you an antiaircraft gun or a tank. No sales tax.

This is Yemen, where we're preparing to send American soldiers to open a new front in the war on terrorism. I admire the instinct of trying to boost security here, but the bottom line is that we're going to send our troops on a poorly defined mission into a country where they're not wanted, where grenades cost $4 each

And if you're so bothered by gun registration, and so convinced that guns don't kill people, then consider moving to a nice mud-brick home here in Suq al-Talh. With you and everybody else carrying around an assault rifle, with armor-piercing rounds in your bandolier, with a couple of grenades in your pockets, you'll really feel safe. You'll love the freedom!

But the main criticism is that you panicked and signed long-term contracts at a very high cost.

If I didn't panic, you wouldn't be able to put out your paper. I saved this friggin' paper. I kept the lights on in this state. Do you understand that? I kept the lights on.

President Bush didn't really do anything until his approval rating in California had fallen to 26 percent. Isn't that true?

He appointed (Nora) Brownell and Pat Wood (to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission). They helped save our behinds. He may have taken a while to do it, and I think the world of President Clinton but the Clinton administration didn't give us any help. They were just trying to get us to raise rates 300-400 percent and I wasn't going to do that.

Legally, Bush's attempt to sidestep Congress in effect will reverse the 1973 Supreme Court Roe vs. Wade ruling that a fetus is not a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Regarding public morality and the law, the American Jesuits have stated: "In a pluralistic society, a fundamental assumption of public policy is the recognition that everything immoral need not be declared illegal – social realities as well as religious principles must be taken into account in judging the wisdom of any legislation." Further, "the pro-lifers' branding of alternate viewpoints as immoral suggests a kind of moral fascism."

In re-igniting the abortion controversy while the country is absorbed with far more weighty problems, the Bush administration obviously disagrees with these views.

"The era of Chinese being bullied is long past," Li was quoted as telling Ambassador Clark Randt, adding: "In the world today, it is a very proud thing to be a Chinese."

In fact, it's extremely rare. It didn't happen at all when Republicans controlled the committee during the Clinton years. The sole Clinton nominee to be defeated was Ronnie White--and he at least made it out of committee and onto the floor, where a majority voted against his nomination.

A nominee was last defeated in committee in 1991, when Democrats stopped Kenneth Ryskamp, nominated by the first President Bush for the 11th Circuit, on a 7-7 vote. The time before that was 1988, when Reagan nominee Bernard Siegan never made it out of Judiciary. Again, the Democrats were in control. A third Republican nominee, Jeff Sessions, was defeated in 1986, this time to the federal district court; Mr. Sessions is now a Senator from Alabama and sits on Judiciary himself.

The Democrat-run Judiciary Committee almost managed to kill two other circuit-court nominations during the Reagan years: Daniel Manion, nominee for the Seventh Circuit in 1986, and Susan Liebeler, nominee for the Federal Circuit in 1988. In both cases, the first vote--on whether to send the nomination to the floor with a recommendation--failed. A second vote succeeded, however, and the nominations went to the floor without recommendation. Judge Manion was confirmed; Mr. Reagan's term expired before the Senate voted on Ms. Liebeler.

Senator Leahy used to disavow this kind of brute partisan force. Five years ago he said: "Every Senator can vote against any nominee. Every Senator has that right. . . . They can vote against them [in] this committee and on the floor. But it is the responsibility of the U.S. Senate to at least bring them to a vote." Joe Biden, who also plans to kill Judge Pickering in committee, said in 1997 that "I also respectfully suggest that everyone who is nominated is entitled to have a shot, to have a hearing and to have a shot to be heard on the floor and have a vote on the floor."

And that's the rub for California National Guard Maj. Gen. Paul Monroe and his counterparts in other states.

"I'm worried about these troops," Monroe said.

While he supports National Guard use, Monroe, the state adjutant general, said border duty puts guardsmen in harm's way – both physically and legally.

He is concerned that guardsmen will be working beside armed federal agents who are conducting inspections and doing other potentially hazardous duties, yet the guardsmen have no weapons for their own defense.

District INS director Adele Fasano downplayed the top brass's concerns, saying she is "very comfortable with this arrangement."

She said the guardsmen won't be enforcing laws, but instead will help search vehicles and provide traffic and crowd control. Troops will not be placed in areas where they could be in danger, she said.

Further, Fasano believes it would be unwise to arm guardsmen in this case because they haven't received the months of specialized training given border inspectors.

"We couldn't properly train soldiers in a short period of time," she said.

Saudi Courage
When a gang of Arab terrorists, most of them Saudis, slammed a pair of hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center, New York firemen rushed into the burning towers to save people. By the time the buildings collapsed, 343 firemen had lost their lives, accounting for more than 10% of the deaths in the Sept. 11 atrocities.

When fire broke out at a girls' school in Mecca on Monday, Saudi firemen tried to save the students. Here's what happened, according to CNN:

The al-Eqtisadiah daily said firemen scuffled with members of the religious police, also known as "mutaween," after they tried to keep the girls inside the burning building because they did not wear head scarves and abayas (black robes) as required by the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam.

The English-language Saudi Gazette, in a front-page report on Thursday, quoted witnesses as saying that members of the police, known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, had stopped men who tried to help the girls warning "it is a sinful to approach them."

One civil defence officer told al-Eqtisadiah he saw three members of the religious police "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya."

Fifteen girls died in the blaze. The official Saudi reaction, reported in the Arab News, sounds like a coverup: "The Civil Defense Department has prepared an official report which casts doubt on whether the members of the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice who allegedly played a role in hampering rescue operation at the fire-hit Makkah [Mecca] girls' school were really members of the organization."

The appointment of Jewish mogul Richard Blum over Dr. Manuela Sosa is just another example of how Jews dominate not only the media, politics and finance but also academia. This power imbalance must not continue or we might be headed for a situation similar to Palestine. We should not replace the outgoing UC Riverside Chancellor who is Jewish with another Jew. Enough is enough. Ya Basta!

BEIJING, March 14 – A group of 25 North Koreans, threatening suicide and claiming they faced starvation and oppression at home, burst into the grounds of the Spanish Embassy today and demanded political asylum.

A German doctor who helped organize the break-in vowed that it was the beginning of an underground railroad from North Korea to the outside world.

Masquerading as a tour group, the band, all sporting black hats, walked down a side street in one of Beijing's embassy districts, and then rushed through open embassy gates just behind a van, witnesses said. A Chinese policeman tackled one refugee at the gate but the man broke through, leaving the guard with only his hat. Once inside the embassy, the group erupted in a raucous cheer.

China's foreign ministry reacted swiftly to the incident announcing that it did not regard the North Koreans as refugees, and thereby liable to protection under international covenants. However, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said China was "in contact with the relevant parties so as to find a proper solution to the issues" – a remark that led some diplomats to conclude that, like last time, China was willing to let the North Koreans leave China.

Diplomatic sources said the group of 25, including six families plus two orphaned girls, then descended on the kitchen of the Spanish ambassador's residence, also on the grounds, and ate all of the food that was to be served tonight at a banquet for a Chinese minister.

WASHINGTON - A fetus outside a woman's body that has a heartbeat or is breathing on its own would be considered "born alive" and given legal protection under a bill approved by the House.

The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, approved by voice vote Tuesday night, would amend the legal definition of "person," "human being," "child" and "individual" to include a fetus that is either breathing or has a heartbeat once out of the womb as part of an abortion procedure.

Nurse Jill Stanek has testified extensively to what has become known as "live-birth abortion." It isn't really abortion at all, however. She witnessed the brutal practice at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, where she was employed: Children are delivered and simply purposely left unattended, to die. These are cases where it is clear that the baby is a baby and he is very much alive.

In congressional testimony last year, Stanek said:

One night, a nursing co-worker was taking an aborted Down syndrome baby who was born alive to our soiled utility room because his parents did not want to hold him, and she did not have time to hold him. I could not bear the thought of this suffering child dying alone in a soiled utility room, so I cradled and rocked him for the 45 minutes that he lived. He was 21 to 22 weeks old, weighed about half a pound, and was about 10 inches long. He was too weak to move very much, expending any energy he had trying to breathe. Toward the end he was so quiet that I couldn't tell if he was still alive unless I held him up to the light to see if his heart was still beating through his chest wall.

The bill is what its father, NRO contributor Hadley Arkes, calls the "most modest first step imaginable on the issue of abortion." To oppose the bill is to affirm that the right to choose includes the right to have a dead baby-even if that means having it killed. Of course, in the age of "wrongful birth" suits this isn't foreign. In fact, it's almost a surprise that there is still some sense of shock or general disapproval at what Stanek testifies to.

My name is Gianna Jessen. I would like to say thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I count it no small thing to speak the truth. I depend solely on the grace of God to do this. I am 23 years old. I was aborted and I did not die. My biological mother was 7 months pregnant when she went to Planned Parenthood in southern California and they advised her to have a late-term saline abortion.

A saline abortion is a solution of salt saline that is injected into the mothers womb. The baby then gulps the solution, it burns the baby inside and out and then the mother is to deliver a dead baby within 24 hours.

This happened to me! I remained in the solution for approximately 18 hours and was delivered ALIVE on April 6, 1977 at 6:00 am in a California abortion clinic. There were young women in the room who had already been given their injections and were waiting to deliver dead babies. When they saw me they experienced the horror of murder. A nurse called an ambulance, while the abortionist was not yet on duty, and had me transferred to the hospital. I weighed a mere two pounds. I was saved by the sheer power of Jesus Christ.

Ladies and gentleman I should be blind, burned.....I should be dead! And yet, I live! Due to a lack of oxygen supply during the abortion I live with cerebral palsy.

When I was diagnosed with this, all I could do was lie there. "They" said that was all I would ever do! Through prayer and hard work by my foster mother, I was walking at age 3 1/2 with the help of a walker and leg braces. At that time I was also adopted into my wonderful family. Today I am left only with a slight limp. I no longer have need of a walker or leg braces.

The Chinese government says it is "deeply shocked" at reports of U.S. military plans to target seven countries, including China, for the possible future use of nuclear weapons.

Speaking to reporters in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi called on Washington to explain the reports which first appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times at the weekend.

According to the newspapers, the secret "nuclear posture review" was passed to the U.S. Congress by the Pentagon in January outlining the possible use of nuclear weapons against countries that possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction.

Apart from China the countries listed on the report are Libya, Syria Russia, Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

It is not possible, either, to quibble with his positions regarding race without being accused of Borking him as a racist, which, as a white Mississippian raised on the gruel of Jim Crow, he once was. (As a law school student, he suggested a way to tighten the state's ban on interracial marriages.)

But that was then, we are told, and this is now. Okay. But now -- which is to say the past 20 years or so -- encompasses a political-judicial career that has been so conservative it is downright reactionary. Not racist, mind you, but hostile to the Voting Rights Act. Not racist, but hostile to the concept of one man, one vote. Not racist, but hostile to plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases and a bit too solicitous of a goon who burned a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple. Pickering contorted both the law and himself to get the guy a reduced sentence.

To his opponents on the Senate Judiciary Committee -- Democrats all -- this cross-burning case stands out. It does so because it is an example of Pickering's getting so worked up over something that he busted through ethical barriers to achieve his purpose. With the cross-burner, he contacted the Justice Department and the prosecutors to get a reduced sentence. This, the experts tell us, is highly inappropriate.

It is also somewhat odd. Judges frequently are compelled by federal regulation to issue disparate and sometimes excessive sentences. One defendant pleads and gets a light sentence. Another refuses a plea and gets the book thrown at him. This is what happened in the cross-burning case.

For a conservative, Pickering can be quite unconservative. As a judge he was overruled 15 times without comment by an appeals court that found him so wrong on the law that the matter just wasn't worth discussing.

Pickering is opposed by his state's black law association as well as the state and national NAACP. It's apparently true that in his hometown, the minority community likes him just fine, but they are judging the man and not the jurist. It is the latter who could do real damage to the body of laws that protect civil rights, not because he is a racist but because he is implacably and, sometimes, hyperventally conservative.

In a way that TV emphasizes, he seems smaller than the office he occupies, less the master of his (or our) fate even than he was when he first took office. More and more he reminds me of that old commercial where the actor says, "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on television."

It is the same with Bush. I, for one, don't think Bush is a dope. But he sure plays one on television.