"We had a raging debate," said a senior marketing executive at one of the cable networks approached to run the two 30-second spots." I looked at the tapes. I thought they were tastefully done," said this executive, who, citing the issue's sensitivity, asked for anonymity. "I didn't like the end line, '[Allies] Against Terrorism.'" This network ended up walking away from a buy that was worth approximately $300,000 to $400,000, the executive said.

This year's report records a 200 percent increase in the number of complaints over the previous year. Most of these complaints occurred after the freedom fighter attacks of Sept. 11. While we initially suspected that the Jews were behind the attacks, further evidence revealed that to be a lie perpetrated by the Jews. It was actually Usama bin Laden, whom we considered condemning, but then thought better of it.

Since the blessed tragic events of Sept. 11, Muslims have experienced increased scrutiny throughout American society. Some have claimed that Muslims in America might seek to mitigate some of these effects by demonstrating loyalty and understanding in the wake of what happened in the decadent city of New York. Thankfully, few have chosen that course. Instead, we have compiled a list of changes to the corrupt American society that will make Muslims feel more at home.

• All American women must wear a headscarf and veil.


• All American media outlets must follow Reuters guidelines on how to refer to freedom fighters, here and abroad.


• The sale of all pork products, particularly SPAM, will cease.


• The sale of all alcohol is banned.


• Any television shows featuring Pamela Anderson will only be available via illicit satellite dishes.


• Each town will form a militia for the "Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice." Bill Clinton and Gary Condit are barred from membership.
  
• All writers and commentators identified as pro-Israel by enlightened columnist Eric Alterman will immediately be jailed. Eric Alterman will be awarded 4 virgins -- if we can find any in America.


• All Jews will be expelled from the country and shipped to Israel, where they can be made more accessible to freedom fighters.


• Any Muslims converting to Christianity, or any other pagan religion, will be executed at the nearest stadium


• All churches and synagogues will be destroyed, as will all paintings and statues.

With just these minor changes, Muslims can be made to feel much more comfortable in America. While we do not expect these changes to take place overnight, we trust that American luminaries like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky will help lead the way as America undergoes its next great revolution. With Muslim civil rights paramount, America will become the best it can be. Much like the worldwide leaders in civil rights: Saudi Arabia and Syria.

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Assailants in black masks stabbed and burned to death 14 Christians, including a six-month-old baby, in the religiously divided capital of Indonesia's Maluku province on Sunday, threatening a fragile peace pact.

The killings came two days after a militant Islamic group, Laskar Jihad, rejected the February peace deal, which was meant to end three years of fighting between Muslims and Christians here that has left 9,000 dead.

It's depressing when the nation's spiritual mentors sound like businessmen fending off indictment, whether at Enron or Merrill Lynch — or, worse, like buck-passing politicians on the order of that preacher's son Gary Condit. In recent months, this seems to be a pattern. Not until weeks after the latest round of Richard Nixon Oval Office recordings were released — and only after a storm of reprimand — did Billy Graham take full responsibility for his anti-Semitic remarks about "the Jews." Even so, his son and successor, Franklin Graham, soon rescinded his father's mea culpa by asserting that the taped quotes had been taken out of context and meant to refer to "liberalism," not Jews. The younger Mr. Graham's disingenuousness is of a piece with Jerry Falwell's and Pat Robertson's pseudo-apology for their televised remarks in which they tried to pin the Sept. 11 attacks on the same all-purpose culprits (gays, feminists) whom some Catholic leaders now hope will take the fall for abusive priests and their enabling higher-ups.

But the abdication of personal responsibility by some religious leaders in America is only half of the confused moral equation since Sept. 11. If too many religious leaders sound like politicians right now, the flip side is that more and more politicians in power are rushing into the ensuing vacuum. They exploit the exigencies of war to sound like clergymen, seizing religious language to veil partisan public policies in a miasma of ersatz godliness.

With the exception of Tom DeLay — who this month announced that "only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world" — no politician in power has ratcheted up this rhetorical religiosity louder than John Ashcroft. In a February speech he declared, "We are a nation called to defend freedom — a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God." So much, then, for that trifling document that defines our freedoms, a k a the Constitution. By wrapping himself in sanctimony as surely as he wrapped the Justice Department's statue of Justice in a blue curtain, our attorney general is trying to supersede civil law on the grounds that he's exercising the Lord's will whatever he does. Last week a U.S. district judge had to intervene and reprimand him for his repeated efforts to criminalize doctors who are obeying a law allowing physician-assisted suicide that has twice been approved by Oregon's voters.

President Bush's penchant for stark religious terminology has waned in the international arena now that he has lost his innocence in the Middle East. He has yet to brand the Israelis, the Palestinians or, for that matter, the Saudis "evildoers." But on the domestic front he has joined Mr. Ashcroft in pumping up the volume of his preening sanctimony, referring to the Almighty so frequently that He is becoming his de facto running mate for 2004. The president's push to ban therapeutic cloning is typically cloaked in a stated reverence for human life, without any humble recognition of the fact that he is playing God in determining that the "life" of a blastocyst, a tiny cluster of cells, is worth more than the lives of those suffering from juvenile diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases whose remedies could be hastened by the most comprehensive medical research.

If we learned anything from Sept. 11, surely it is that there is a reason to worry when politicians hijack religion — just as we've learned from the church's scandal of the dangers that abound when religious leaders value political self-preservation over protecting the defenseless in their flock.

Sure enough, the substantive part of the Bush administration's air pollution plan is a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury. So what is there to complain about? Alas, lots.

First, the plan conspicuously fails to include carbon dioxide, the main cause of global warming. Aside from violating one of Mr. Bush's campaign pledges, this omission casts a long shadow over future policy. Environmental experts tell me that it would be much cheaper to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as part of an integrated, multi-pollutant strategy than to add on carbon dioxide controls later, after key investment decisions have already been made. So by doing nothing about global warming, this administration compromises the policies of future administrations too.

Second, the Bush plan still allows twice as much pollution as experts at the Environmental Protection Agency privately think appropriate. The cost of an additional 50 percent reduction in pollution, according to internal E.P.A. documents, would be pretty small. But the administration apparently prefers not to ask industry to bear even those small costs.

So what's actually on offer is a modest new pollution initiative, maybe, eventually, if and when the administration gets around to it. Don't you know there's a war on? And meanwhile the big polluters get what they paid for in campaign contributions: a multibillion-dollar free pass.

With a landmark state study on slave-era insurance policies about to be released, Gov. Gray Davis addressed the issue of possible reparations to California minorities yesterday, saying, "Clearly, we want to right any wrongs and do justice to people who were taken advantage of."

Jackson, at a news conference, said the California Department of Insurance study on slave-era insurance practices represented "a ground-breaking national issue." He said the findings, scheduled to be released Wednesday, might raise the possibility of reparations from private businesses owed to African Americans -- and Californians of Chinese and Mexican descent.

"We do know that the same ships that brought Africans over, to become African Americans . . . brought in Chinese to the West Coast," said Jackson, referring to immigrant laborers, known derogatorily as "coolies," who worked on the railroads and other building projects, including the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta levees.

Jackson said African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans, also appeared to have been the victims of unethical insurance business practices in which they were charged more than whites for the same services.

Jackson, in an editorial board meeting at The Chronicle this week, said he would not expect reparations to be paid to individuals but to nonprofit groups, educational programs, arts facilities or other groups that help minorities.

Asked specifically about his position on reparations yesterday, the governor declined to comment, saying he would await the release of Low's formal findings.

But he noted, "I signed the legislation that commissioned the study by the insurance commissioner."

The state law, which took effect in January, authorizes state researchers to collect data on slaveholder insurance policies issued before 1865.

Davis promised that Low "will indicate in detail which, if any, companies have not treated their policyholders properly, and what the appropriate remedies are for those policyholders."

The insurance commissioner's study collected data on businesses that insured slaves, much the same as they insured cargo or property, Scott Esalen, public information officer for Low's office, said yesterday. In what appears to be an unexpected finding, some of the data collected has confirmed that some Chinese workers were insured in the same manner -- after one insurance firm submitted a policy covering "coolie" workers in response to the state's request for information, Esalen said yesterday.

A companion bill directs the University of California to hold a research conference to examine the economic legacy of slavery, which may well try to tote up the economic benefits of slavery for owners and the insurers. This study could attempt to put a dollar amount on the damages resulting from slavery, one source said yesterday.

But the issue of reparations to minorities in California -- which has the nation's largest minority population -- poses a potentially thorny problem for Davis in his re-election year.

The Democratic governor must satisfy the concerns of legions of minority voters in his Democratic base, who were represented in force yesterday at Jackson's business conference.

But 71 percent of the Californians who voted in the 2000 presidential election were non-Latino and white, studies have shown.

Davis also has been under fire from Republicans, including his opponent in November, Bill Simon, who charged this week that the governor had been unfriendly to California business; his support of reparations could hand the Republicans even more ammunition.

Davis suggested yesterday that he would side with Jackson on the issue.

"Clearly, we want to right any wrongs and do justice to people who were taken advantage of, if that is the case," Davis said. "I believe that will be the case."

Nigerian Muslim prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for two men accused of converting from Islam to Christianity.

Lawali Yakubu and Ali Jafaru have been given three days to re-convert by an Islamic court judge in Mada.

They are accused of joining the Great Commission Movement, an international evangelical church with a strong following in Nigeria.

Sharia court judge Auwal Jabaka said the Koran calls for the execution of Muslims who accept another religion.

But he said it is unclear whether the state's two-year-old Shariah penal code also permits such a punishment.

Jabaka adjourned the court for three days to allow the accused to "change their minds" and convert back to Islam.

In the meantime, he called on the Zamfara government to clarify its position on the matter.

"If the law empowers me to (execute the two for converting from Islam to Christianity), I will have no hesitation in doing that," the judge said.

In their eagerness to move production offshore, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business all join in a chant of "free trade, fast track." The retailers who make a bigger profit on imported goods cry "free trade, fast track," and newspapers, who make money from retail advertising, editorialize for free trade. But these cries are not really for making trade free — they are for transferring power over trade to the executive branch and favored corporate interests. This should not be the way economic policy works in a democracy.

The Bush administration contends that trade agreements are passing us by because the president doesn't have fast track authority. This is baloney. During the 90's we entered into more than nearly 200 international commercial agreements without fast track, including the Caribbean Basin Initiative, and agreements with sub-Saharan Africa, Jordan and Vietnam.

Under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution it is not the president but Congress that shall "regulate commerce with foreign nations." But the fix is in. The fast track bill will be called in the Senate only when the White House knows it has the 60 votes necessary to invoke cloture. Debate will therefore be limited. No one will listen to it anyway because they'll know the vote is fixed. Fast track will be passed, and the United States will continue to lose business.

This failure to protect American workers is of relatively recent vintage. Since American independence, controls on trade gave government a way to shelter industries from foreign competition so they could grow or restructure. Tariffs were also an important source of government revenue. (There was no income tax until 1913.) President Lincoln protected steel, President Franklin Roosevelt instituted protectionism for agriculture and President Eisenhower for oil. The industrial giant of America was built on careful protectionism.

This changed after World War II. We were the world's leading industrial power. Devastated countries in Europe and Asia were given aid, equipment and the expertise to rebuild — and the cold war was won. Fundamental to this victory was the American treatment of foreign trade as foreign aid. We set an example by opening up the American market. But our competition refused to follow suit. Instead, they protected their manufacturers.

As our competitors began to prosper, American managers were learning a different lesson from their experiences with overseas rebuilding. They learned that moving work overseas could save money. Labor costs in manufacture can be 30 percent of sales. A company that retains its executive offices in America but moves its production to a low-wage area could save as much as 20 percent in sales volume. Thus, a corporation with $500 million in sales could increase its pretax profits by $100 million. Accordingly, manufacture has been leaving the United States in droves. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, little South Carolina has lost 53,900 textile jobs since the free trade agreement with Mexico. Since the 1979 Tokyo Round agreements — in which fast-track authority took on its current form — America has lost more than four million manufacturing jobs, or 20 percent of our manufacturing work force.Giving fast-track authority to President Bush will only worsen this problem.

The nonagricultural job count reached 1.9 million in 2000, with the addition of over 46,000 jobs. Industries posting healthy employment gains over the year were services (+17,300), trade (+9,000) and government (+8,000). Manufacturing employment rebounded in 2000, adding 2,700 jobs compared to a 2,800 decline in 1999. The main contributors to this increase were the automotive-related sectors, boosted by recent high-profile expansions announced by BMW and Robert Bosch Corporation.
...
South Carolina’s unemployment rate averaged 3.9% in 2000, down from 4.5% in 1999.
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South Carolina continued to experience an increase in population, due to increased job growth and internal migration.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, hundreds of millions of people have entered the world's workforce ready to accept a minimal standard of living. In contrast, America continues to protect or raise its standard of living with requirements for a minimum wage, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, safe workplaces and machinery, clean air and water, plant closing notice and unpaid parental leave. A plant can move to Mexico and find a workforce with none of these requirements and an average individual wage that is 11 percent of the American equivalent.

Today, more than half of what we consume as a nation is imported, and we produce little to export. Recently I rode Acela, the fast train from Washington to New York that was made in Canada. Advanced technology, which was supposed to be the motor of domestic growth, is now imported. We have a deficit in the balance of trade in semiconductors, according to the International Trade Commission. My insurance policy is administered in Dublin, my light bill in Bangalore, India.

This mantra of "free trade, fast track" must not keep us from seeing the drawbacks of simply allowing merchants and whoever is president determine the shape of our nation. We have done very well for more than two centuries with having substantial democratic control of commercial relations. There is every reason to continue with it.

Years ago, Akio Morita of Sony admonished third world nations that they had to develop strong manufacturing sectors to become nation states. Turning to me, he said, "Senator, that world power that loses its manufacturing capacity will cease to be a world power."

After Bush became president, his administration cut funding for the Ex-Im Bank by 25 percent, a major blow to corporations such as Boeing that relied heavily on the bank's loans to promote exports.

The cut was a major surprise to the U.S. corporate community that had backed his presidential bid. Bush's cut in bank funding was denounced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Police demolish church under construction in Hebei

Rome (Fides) – On April 11 police demolished a Catholic church in Xiao Zhao village in the province of Hebei, 200 kilometers south of Beijing. Xiao Zhao village is in the underground diocese of Zhen Ding. The local Catholics, who had obtained the land and regular building permit for the church from the local authorities, fear that the demolition orders may have come from higher authorities.

Early yesterday morning, a security force of about 2000 men entered the village. Military tanks pushed down the semi-finished walls of the building and the foundations were destroyed with explosives. The local Catholic community, about 700 people, could do nothing to stop the demolition. Eyewitnesses say they simply stood and watched, "crying and praying".

How many humans have been treated by embryonic stem cells? Zero. Indeed, before human trials can even be safely undertaken researchers will have to overcome two serious difficulties that stand between patients and embryonic-cell regenerative medicine: 1) ES cells cause tumors, and 2) ES cells may be rejected by the immune system. Surmounting these difficulties — if they can be surmounted at all — will take a very long time and much expense. There is no risk of rejection with adult cells, by contrast, because they come from the patients' own bodies. Nor, at least so far, does adult-stem-cell therapy appear to cause tumors. This puts adult therapies years ahead of the game.

[A] slightly left-of-center candidate runs for president. In a rational world he would win easily. After all, his party has been running the country, with great success: unemployment is down, economic growth has accelerated, the sense of malaise that prevailed under the previous administration has evaporated.

But everything goes wrong. His moderation becomes a liability; denouncing the candidate's pro-market stance, left-wing candidates — who have no chance of winning, but are engaged in politics as theater — draw off crucial support. The candidate, though by every indication a very good human being, is not a natural campaigner; he has, say critics, "a professorial style" that seems "condescending and humorless" to many voters. Above all, there is apathy and complacency among moderates; they take it for granted that he will win, or that in any case the election will make little difference.

The result is a stunning victory for the hard right. It's by and large a tolerant, open-minded country; but there is a hard core, maybe 20 percent of the electorate, that is deeply angry even in good times. And owing to the peculiarities of the electoral system, this right-wing minority prevails even though more people actually cast their votes for the moderate left.

If all this sounds like a post-mortem on the Gore campaign in 2000, that's intentional. But I'm actually describing Sunday's shocking election in France, in which the current prime minister, Lionel Jospin, placed third, behind the rabid rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen. Until very recently, Mr. Le Pen was regarded as a spent force. Now he has scored an astonishing triumph.

What the French election revealed is that in France, as in the United States, there are a lot of angry people. They aren't a majority; Mr. Le Pen received about 17 percent of the vote, less than Ross Perot got here in 1992. But they are highly motivated, and can exert influence out of proportion to their numbers if moderates take a tolerant society for granted.

What are the angry people angry about? Not economics; peace and prosperity did not reconcile them to Bill Clinton or to Mr. Jospin. Instead, it seems to be about traditional values. Our angry right rails against godless liberals; France's targets immigrants. In both cases, what really seems to bother them is the loss of certainty; they want to return to a simpler time, one without that disturbing modern mix of people and ideas.

And in both cases this angry minority has had far more influence than its numbers would suggest, largely because of the fecklessness of the left and the apathy of moderates. Al Gore had Ralph Nader; Mr. Jospin had a potpourri of silly leftists (two Trotskyists took 10 percent of the vote). And both men were mocked and neglected by complacent moderates.

Now for the important difference. Mr. Le Pen is a political outsider; his showing in Sunday's election puts him into the second-round runoff, but he won't actually become France's president. So his hard-right ideas won't be put into practice anytime soon.

In the United States, by contrast, the hard right has essentially been co-opted by the Republican Party — or maybe it's the other way around. In this country people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr. Le Pen's are in a position to put those views into practice.

Consider, for example, the case of Representative Tom DeLay. Last week Mr. DeLay told a group that he was on a mission from God to promote a "biblical worldview," and that he had pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in part because Mr. Clinton held "the wrong worldview." Well, there are strange politicians everywhere. But Mr. DeLay is the House majority whip — and, in the view of most observers, the real power behind Speaker Dennis Hastert.

And then there's John Ashcroft.

What France's election revealed is that we and the French have more in common than either country would like to admit. There as here, there turns out to be a lot of irrational anger lurking just below the surface of politics as usual. The difference is that here the angry people are already running the country.

Forensic pathologist Derrick Pounder from Dundee University in Scotland, who had just returned from Jenin, said the lack of severely injured people admitted to the hospital backed claims that Palestinian doctors and ambulance men had been impeded.

"There were no severely injured in the hospital, and very few corpses. It is inconceivable that, as well as the dead, there were not large numbers of severely injured," said Pounder, who estimated a conflict of this nature and intensity would have produced roughly three badly injured victims to every one dead.

He said he saw 21 Palestinians corpses in Jenin hospital. The casualties were a mixture of civilian and military, he said, and included three women.

One was a 52-year-old man, wearing sandals, who had been shot in the chest, and another 38-year-old, wearing ordinary clothes, had been shot in the back and the top of the foot.

"The claim that only fighters were killed is simply not true," Pounder said. "In Jenin, there have certainly been mass killings -- both of combatants and civilians."

Anyone curious about what a worst-case global warming scenario might look like could peer through space to Earth's closest cousin: Venus.

Although Earth and Venus are very similar in size, mass and density, Venus is enshrouded in a thick layer of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid that traps heat in and leads to extreme warming.

This has made the planet hotter — much hotter.

Average temperatures on the cloud-choked planet average about 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The inferno-like conditions on Venus have led some to call it "Earth's evil twin." Researchers believe there is much we might learn about our own planet through Earth's darker, hotter twin and this week scientists from the European Union and NASA are meeting to discuss possible missions to Venus in 2005.

Even if Kyoto is “fatally flawed,” as Bush declared, his withdrawal was done in a high-handed manner that failed to show respect for multilateral diplomacy; and having declared Kyoto kaput, Bush made himself look feeble by failing to propose an alternative. But in no sense did the president “ kill” rules on carbon dioxide, because there aren’t any carbon dioxide rules to kill. No law currently governs this substance, either in the United States or the European Union. Neither Bill Clinton nor Al Gore, when in the White House, ever proposed any binding rules on carbon dioxide. True, Kyoto would have created greenhouse-gas rules. But even here, Bush cannot be accused of a “kill.” Clinton never submitted the protocol to the Senate, because he knew there was no chance it would be ratified; in a 1997 floor test, the Senate rejected key provisions of the Kyoto proposal by 95-0, meaning the idea failed to draw even one Democratic vote.

Just a few weeks into his presidency, Bush and Whitman decided to uphold a strict, sweeping Clinton proposal that diesel fuel be chemically reformulated to reduce its inherent pollution content. (Reformulation of gasoline, which has occurred largely outside the public eye, is a reason smog is declining almost everywhere, even in Los Angeles and Houston.) Bush went ahead with the diesel fuel regulation, though it will cost billions of dollars and was vehemently opposed by the petroleum industry, to which Bush is supposedly sold out. The president upheld the rule because its scientific grounding is very strong: studies have shown that diesel pollutants cause respiratory disease and thousands of annual premature deaths.

Yet though the public-health significance of the diesel regulation is far greater than of the arsenic decision, most newspapers did not put the diesel decision on page one, while pundits denouncing the White House about the environment never mention this subject. It’s a sign of the media one-track mind that even after Bush announced had imposed the new diesel regulation and upheld the Clinton arsenic rule, the New York Times ran a prominent story headlined, BUSH TEAM IS REVERSING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES.

I had a conversion with a New York Times editor about why the paper was carpetbombing the Midwest powerplants angle while saying almost nothing about the far more significant national emission-reduction proposal. The conversation went approximately as follows.

Me. Why aren’t you praising the Bush emission reduction proposal?

Editor. Because he wants to replace current rules with a single standard. That means eliminating regulations. That makes it a rollback.

Me. But pollution would decline. What is the goal, more regulations or less pollution?

Editor. Anything that changes an existing regulation is rollback. We are opposed to rollbacks.

Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the environmental and energy policies of our government are completely dominated by a group of current and former oil and chemical company executives who are trying to dismantle America's ability to force them to reduce the extremely dangerous levels of pollution in the earth's atmosphere.

The first step was to withdraw from the agreement reached in Kyoto to begin limiting worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases. Then the administration cancelled an agreement requiring automobile companies to make the leap to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Other acts of sabotage are taking place behind the scenes. Just as Enron executives were allowed to interview candidates for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — and to veto those they didn't think would approve of Enron's agenda — ExxonMobil has been allowed to veto the United States government's selection of who will head the prestigious scientific panel that monitors global warming. Dr. Robert Watson, the highly respected leader of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, was blackballed in a memo to the White House from the nation's largest oil company. The memo had its effect last Friday, when Dr. Watson lost his bid for re-election after the administration threw its weight behind the "let's drag our feet" candidate, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri of New Delhi, who is known for his virulent anti-American statements.

Why is this happening?

Because the largest polluters know their only hope for escaping restrictions lies in promoting confusion about global warming.

Just as Enron needed auditors who wouldn't blow the whistle when the company lied about the magnitude of its future liabilities, the administration needs scientific reviews that won't sound the alarm on the destruction of the earth's climate balance.

How long they get away with it depends on how long they can sow confusion and doubt. But with folks wearing bikinis in Boston in the middle of April and with the massive melting of ice at both poles and in nearly every mountain glacier on earth, public awareness and concern are growing rapidly.

At a time when the world needs enduring leadership from the United States to rally all nations to join in a concerted effort to stop global warming, the administration is working overtime to block any progress whatsoever.

So tomorrow, on this Earth Day, more than ever before, we need real, forward-thinking leadership and a renewed focus on the environment. True leadership means ensuring that we take the necessary steps to leave a cleaner environment for generations to come — and that means strengthening environmental protections.

In January 1996, with full support from Israel and responding to the invitation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Carter Center helped to monitor a democratic election in the West Bank and Gaza, which was well organized, open and fair. In that election, 88 members were elected to the Palestinian National Authority, with Yasir Arafat as president. Legally and practically, the Palestinian people were encouraged to form their own government, with the expectation that they would soon have full sovereignty as a state.

When the election was over, I made a strong effort to persuade the leaders of Hamas to accept the election results, with Mr. Arafat as their leader. I relayed a message offering them full participation in the process of developing a permanent constitutional framework for the new political entity, but they refused to accept this proposal. Despite this rejection, it was a time of peace and hope, and there was no threat of violence or even peaceful demonstrations. The legal status of the Palestinian people has not changed since then, but their plight has grown desperate.

Ariel Sharon is a strong and forceful man and has never equivocated in his public declarations nor deviated from his ultimate purpose. His rejection of all peace agreements that included Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands, his invasion of Lebanon, his provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the destruction of villages and homes, the arrests of thousands of Palestinians and his open defiance of President George W. Bush's demand that he comply with international law have all been orchestrated to accomplish his ultimate goals: to establish Israeli settlements as widely as possible throughout occupied territories and to deny Palestinians a cohesive political existence.

There is adequate blame on the other side. Even when he was free and enjoying the full trappings of political power, Yasir Arafat never exerted control over Hamas and other radical Palestinians who reject the concept of a peaceful Israeli existence and adopt any means to accomplish their goal. Mr. Arafat's all-too-rare denunciations of violence have been spasmodic, often expressed only in English and likely insincere. He may well see the suicide attacks as one of the few ways to retaliate against his tormentors, to dramatize the suffering of his people, or as a means for him, vicariously, to be a martyr.

Tragically, the policies of Mr. Sharon have greatly strengthened these criminal elements, enhanced their popular support, and encouraged misguided young men and women to sacrifice their own lives in attacking innocent Israeli citizens. The abhorrent suicide bombings are also counterproductive in that they discredit the Palestinian cause, help perpetuate the military occupation and destruction of villages, and obstruct efforts toward peace and justice.

The situation is not hopeless. There is an ultimate avenue to peace in the implementation of United Nations resolutions, including Resolution 242, expressed most recently in the highly publicized proposal of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah. The basic premises of these resolutions are withdrawal of Israelis from Palestinian lands in exchange for full acceptance of Israel and Israel's right to live in peace. This is a reasonable solution for many Israelis, having been accepted in 1978 by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and ratified by the Israeli Knesset. Egypt, offering the greatest threat to Israel, responded by establishing full diplomatic relations and honoring Israeli rights, including unimpeded use of the Suez canal. This set a pattern for what can and must be done by all other Arab nations. Through constructive negotiations, both sides can consider some modifications of the 1967 boundary lines.

East Jerusalem can be jointly administered with unimpeded access to holy places, and the right of return can be addressed by permitting a limited number of displaced Palestinians to return to their homeland with fair compensation to others. It will be a good investment for the international community to pay this cost.

With the ready and potentially unanimous backing of the international community, the United States government can bring about such a solution to the existing imbroglio. Demands on both sides should be so patently fair and balanced that at least a majority of citizens in the affected area will respond with approval, and an international force can monitor compliance with agreed peace terms, as was approved for the Sinai region in 1979 following Israel's withdrawal from Egyptian territory.

There are two existing factors that offer success to United States persuasion. One is the legal requirement that American weapons are to be used by Israel only for defensive purposes, a premise certainly being violated in the recent destruction of Jenin and other villages. Richard Nixon imposed this requirement to stop Ariel Sharon and Israel's military advance into Egypt in the 1973 war, and I used the same demand to deter Israeli attacks on Lebanon in 1979. (A full invasion was launched by Ariel Sharon after I left office). The other persuasive factor is approximately $10 million daily in American aid to Israel. President George Bush Sr. threatened this assistance in 1992 to prevent the building of Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

I understand the extreme political sensitivity in America of using persuasion on the Israelis, but it is important to remember that none of the actions toward peace would involve an encroachment on the sovereign territory of Israel. They all involve lands of the Egyptians, Lebanese and Palestinians, as recognized by international law.

The existing situation is tragic and likely to get worse. Normal diplomatic efforts have failed. It is time for the United States, as the sole recognized intermediary, to consider more forceful action for peace. The rest of the world will welcome this leadership.

[T[he Bush administration really, really dislikes sharing information with Congress. Dick Cheney refuses to release the records of his energy task force; Tom Ridge won't testify on homeland security; and last week Thomas Scully defied a subpoena from the Small Business Committee.

The background is the recent surge in health care expenses. During the 1990's the rise of H.M.O.'s put a squeeze on medical bills; now there is nothing left to squeeze. So H.M.O.'s are sharply increasing their payments to health-care providers, and the federal programs overseen by Mr. Scully are under pressure to follow suit. Since these programs cost more than national defense, we're talking about a lot of money here.

Still, if medical care is a priority, which it surely is for the voters, why doesn't the government simply provide the necessary resources? You already know the answer: it's hard to reconcile realistic spending increases with plans for more tax cuts.

Last year the administration claimed that it could easily cut taxes without tapping the Social Security surplus. Those claims were false, but Sept. 11 provided cover: who cares about lockboxes when we're in pursuit of evildoers?

True, skeptics have raised a few questions. Given that we face a major new demand on the budget, shouldn't we reconsider a tax cut proposed in more peaceful times? (Instead, the administration wants to make the tax cut permanent.) Don't taxes normally go up in wartime, as a matter of shared sacrifice? And isn't it a little strange, given all the martial rhetoric, that the administration's recent 10-year budget proposal allocated more money to a second round of tax cuts ($665 billion) than it did to new defense spending ($625 billion)?

But as the cartoonist Tom Tomorrow has explained, the answer to all such questions is, "Why do you hate America?" A patriotic public is in no mood to question its leader's policies.

The really amazing thing is that raiding the lockbox wasn't enough. In the name of fighting terrorism the administration has in effect diverted $2 trillion of Social Security surpluses, previously pledged to debt reduction, to cover the revenue losses from tax cuts. But realistic projections now show permanent deficits in the federal budget as a whole. This threatens the administration's story line, which says that now is the time for even more tax cuts.

So there is intense pressure within the administration to dress up the fiscal picture by underestimating future spending — health-care spending in particular. Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities writes that the administration's budget "assumes an extraordinarily low rate of growth in Medicare costs." And since it would be hard to justify low projections of future cost growth if current costs are surging, there is also intense pressure to keep actual Medicare payments low, despite rapidly rising costs in the private sector.

And that brings us back to Mr. Scully's defiance. Any health-care professional will tell you that Medicare's payment rates are increasingly inadequate. Many physicians now turn away Medicare patients; and service providers, like the companies that do X-rays at nursing homes, are going out of business. When Mr. Scully discovered that he would have to face some of those service providers, he walked out. You can't blame him (except that he was breaking the law). After all, he's under orders to keep those numbers down.

The real lesson here is that things add up. The administration has been able to push tax cuts that mainly go to the wealthiest few percent of Americans, because the downside seems abstract; the middle class doesn't understand that those cuts will eventually starve programs that it counts on, like Medicare.

But the downside has already begun. There is a direct link between the administration's affluent-friendly tax cuts and the growing crisis of Medicare underfunding; it really is a case of their wealth versus your health.

Democrats sought to tie the vote to what they view as their most potent electoral issue, the future of Social Security. They said that allocating hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the tax cut in perpetuity would endanger the government's ability to pay Social Security benefits when the vast boomer generation retires.

"The issue is what's going to happen on Social Security," said Representative Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat of Missouri, the minority leader. "Mark my words, it's going to be an issue in the election."

A former Los Angeles Times employee surrendered to Los Angeles police Monday in connection with the theft of $64,236 from the newspaper's Sept. 11 Disaster Relief Fund.

Michael Childress, 35, a temporary employee hired to process mail and donations to the fund, is scheduled for arraignment today on two counts of theft and three counts of grand theft.

Prosecutors said the thefts were uncovered after several donors complained about grammatical and spelling errors in the thank-you notes they received from The Times. "If this guy had used spell check, he might have gotten away with it," said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.

In the procedure, the French researchers took bone marrow cells -- the source of blood stem cells -- from the patients and infected them with a retrovirus carrying the normal gene as a payload. The cells were then grown in large quantities and returned to the boys. They then homed to the bone marrow, and to other tissues, on their own.

To reverse the gene defect, doctors at Necker Hospital in Paris drew bone marrow from the boys. They culled stem cells from the marrow and mixed them with a harmless virus in which a gene that makes the missing protein had been inserted. After the virus infected the bone marrow cells, millions of each boy's cells were injected into his bloodstream.

[I]n praise of brainy women: Shortly after we were married, my wife tearfully confessed that her I.Q., at 178, was 45 points higher than mine, had been salutatorian of her college class, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

I was shocked, but divorce was out of the question. It has been terrible to live with, but there have been compensations: 1) Our children are a lot smarter . . . 2) She remembers people's names, places we have visited, and learns foreign languages the way I catch colds.

Men, don't fear that cute little genius you have your eye on.

"They want to find somebody who is as much or MORE: good looking, socially skilled and well-off," writes Mike "not Mormon" Dropkin of Sugarhouse, Utah. "What do successful men want? Typically, a good-looking women who is kind."

Steven Greenfield agrees: "I find that most successful women have little respect for a man who does not out-earn them. I am all too frequently made to feel as though I am the sum total of my résumé, which is embarrassingly slim in their eyes."

Inside the Special Housing Unit of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, dozens of detainees held for months in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have been confined to their cells nearly 24 hours a day.

The lights are always on, making it difficult to sleep. The prisoners are subject to body cavity searches after each meeting with their attorneys. They are transported in shackles, handcuffs and waist chains. In some cases, the detainees have been subject to harassment by prison guards and rough treatment that has left them bloodied.

[Syed Amjad] Jaffri said he was taken to an INS detention facility in Manhattan. There, he said, he was questioned again by the FBI. When he asked to see an attorney, Jaffri said, the agent swore at him and told him: "You're going to learn the hard way." Jaffri could not identify the agent.

The next day, Jaffri said, he was brought to MDC in a motorcade that included police cars with sirens blaring. With shackles around his ankles and his hands cuffed to a heavy chain around his waist, Jaffri said, he was seized by MDC guards and thrown face first into a wall. The impact, he said, bloodied his mouth and loosened his teeth.

CAIR is investigating several nefarious attempts by users trying to manipulate the votes. Thank you for your patience while we isolate and correct the problem.

Please be advised that such systems that help in weighing public opinion should not be misused.

No matter which one is true--my guess is neither--their response is preposterous. No one who wants to "weigh public opinion" uses a website poll. At best, these polls are like parlor games--a way for the regular devotees of a site to get to know one another better, at worst they are tools for demagoguing--something CAIR is expert at. In fact CAIR has an entire section of their website devoted to "Action Alerts" where they inform their viewers to mass e-mail people who say things they find objectionable. They give out e-mail addresses and telephone numbers and encourage people to swamp elected officials and members of the media.

In its mission statement CAIR says that they are "dedicated to presenting an Islamic perspective on issues of importance to the American public." And with their little poll fiasco, they've certainly given us all a lesson in the "Islamic perspective."

Like Yasser Arafat, the folks at CAIR are happy to bully others with loud protests against discrimination and humiliations. Like the Saudis, they're intolerant of dissenting viewpoints. Like the Taliban, they're willing to create an "official" version of the truth to bury opinions and beliefs they don't like. And just like the Arab Muslims who believe the Mossad was behind September 11, they're nestled deep in conspiracy theories.

The Islamic perspective indeed.

Here, I think, we have the germ of an idea for a simply spectacular feminist holiday — one that can succeed in wiping out "gender" in a way that Take Our Daughters to Work Day cannot. Feminists need to turn April 25 into Women Date Down Day — a day on which successful women everywhere are encouraged to ask less successful men out on dates (naturally, the women should do the asking). Participation may be limited in the early years, but the eventual success of Women Date Down Day promises to work a change in gender roles in a way that Take Our Daughters to Work Day never will.

Women Date Down Day has several advantages over Take Our Daughters to Work Day. For one thing, both men and women can participate. This should silence the complaints of those who worry about boys being left behind on Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Second, Women Date Down Day can fill the vacuum left by the old Sadie Hawkins Day, which is no longer observed. Of course, Sadie Hawkins Day was about women chasing after men for a date, but in the feminist version, the rules will be changed. Women will still chase men, but they have to be less successful men.

At the opening of "The Sweet Smell of Success" last month, a successful New York guy I know took me aside for a lecture that was anything but sweet.

He said he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages, but nixed the idea because my job made me too intimidating.

Men, he told me, prefer women who seem malleable and overawed. He said I would never find a mate, because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything?

The January media advisory promised a dramatic tale: "Governor Gray Davis to save state trauma centers from budget ax."

What it didn't say: The governor's own Department of Finance had put the $25 million on the chopping block.

Three months later, the governor told 400 doctors who belong to the powerful California Medical Association that he would expand a health care program for children. He didn't mention his original plans to phase out the program.

In both cases, the governor essentially took credit for saving popular programs from himself. In neither case did he say he had reversed his position or explain why.

Together, the incidents show how Davis has tried to win favorable publicity during what is certain to be a thankless task: dealing with a daunting $17 billion budget deficit that could require massive cuts.

We just returned from Friday night services, where I was reminded of Golda Meir's remarks probably 40 years ago. Asked when there would be peace between Israel and the Palestinians, she replied, "When the Palestinians learn to love their children more than they hate the Jews."

I guess we're not there yet.

We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11. What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? … What do they have to hide?

In the interview, McKinney asserted that the Bush administration was serving the interests of the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based investment firm that employs several high-ranking former government officials from both parties and counts former President George H.W. Bush as an adviser.

Carlyle Spokesman Chris Ullman balked at McKinney's radio interview, telling The Washington Post, "Did she say these things while standing on a grassy knoll in Roswell, New Mexico?"

Catch that? "Why did they not warn the innocent people…who were needlessly murdered?" In other words, the Bush administration knew these people were going to be murdered and they did nothing about it. She also adds that "persons close to this administration are poised to make huge profits off America's new war." These are not complicated dots to connect. Ms. McKinney believes, or says she believes — not necessarily the same thing, of course — that the Bush administration is guilty of aiding and abetting the mass murder of American citizens for profit.

When confronted, McKinney backpedaled a few millimeters. In a statement she explained: "I am not aware of any evidence showing that President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9-11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case."

I see. Well, just let me just say that I am not aware of any evidence that Ms. McKinney has murdered several children or that she personally profited from sleeping with the entire defensive squad of the Atlanta Falcons. However, a complete investigation might reveal that to be the case.

In early January, shortly after Miami crushed Nebraska in the Rose Bowl, Nebraska football Assistant Coach Ron Brown journeyed to a Los Angeles hotel to interview for the coaching job at Stanford.
But he didn't get any further than the initial interview.

The reason: It soon became apparent his religious views, among other things, were incompatible with Stanford's liberal student body and active gay community.

"(His religion) was definitely something that had to be considered," said Alan Glenn, Stanford's assistant athletic director of human resources. "We're a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at. ... It was one of many variables that was considered."

[I] don't know if anyone has done a calculation, but it's obvious that the Bush administration has appointed a record number of corporate executives to high-level positions, often regulating or doing business with their former employers.

The administration clearly doesn't worry about conflicts of interest, but you don't have to posit outright corruption to wonder. For example: The secretaries of the Navy and Air Force are both lifelong defense-contractor executives. Won't they tend in the nature of things to believe that what's good for General Dynamics is good for America? Indeed, defense stocks have soared, partly because Wall Street analysts predict that profit margins on future contracts will be far higher than was considered appropriate in the past.

But there's a further question. Many of the business executives recently appointed to government positions first entered the private sector after prior careers in the Reagan and Bush I administrations.

As Sebastian Mallaby put it in The Washington Post, they are "political types dressed up in corporate clothing: people who got hired by business because they knew government, then hired by government on the theory that they knew business." (Dick Cheney is the quintessential example.) So are they really good businessmen, or are they just crony capitalists, men who have lived by their connections?

Consider the case of Thomas White, secretary of the Army, a former general who became a top Enron executive in 1990. His behavior in office has raised eyebrows. He did not follow the rules about disposing of stock options; he and his wife are alleged to have taken a military jet to Aspen on personal business; and he sold $12 million of Enron stock shortly before the company's implosion, though he says that no inside information was conveyed in the 70-plus phone conversations he had with his former colleagues. But this stuff — which would have led to multiple investigations had he been a Clinton appointee — is actually secondary.

The really important information about Mr. White is that the enterprise he ran, Enron Energy Services, was a fraud — a money-losing operation dressed up to appear highly profitable through deceptive accounting. It is possible though implausible that Mr. White was duped by his subordinates, that he honestly thought that he was doing a great job. But that only makes him a fool rather than a knave.

Stories about Mr. White's questionable behavior at his current job have emerged only recently, but it has been apparent for months that he was a Potemkin executive: all facade, with nothing behind it. Given that he was hired for his supposed business skills, this means that he is like a surgeon general who turns out never to have finished medical school.

So why does this administration, which is waving the flag so hard its arms must hurt, leave the Army — the Army! — in the hands of a man who is, at best, a poseur?

One theory I've heard is that Mr. White can't be fired: that there are facts about the administration's relationship with Enron that it doesn't want to come out, and that Mr. White knows where the bodies are buried.

My preferred explanation, however, is that Mr. White has been protected by the administration's infallibility complex. In case you haven't noticed, this administration never, ever admits making a mistake; even when it makes a policy U-turn, it tries to rewrite history to pretend that everything is still going according to plan. One recent example involved foreign aid. First the administration came out with a miserly proposal; faced with outrage from the rest of the world, it doubled its offer. But it claimed, to an incredulous press corps, that there had been no change in plan, that the proposal had simply been badly presented.

If Mr. White is forced to leave, however, it would be hard to deny that in hiring him for his supposed business skills the administration was suckered, in much the same way that Enron's investors were suckered. And so he remains.

It's not hard to see why the administration hired Mr. White: on paper, his qualifications looked pretty good. But the fact that he is still in place is very bad news. Maybe there are some dark secrets here; or maybe it's just arrogance and lack of moral courage. Either way, this is no way to run an army — or the country.

There are several things the Democrats and their moderate Republican allies can do to produce a respectable bill. First, they must defeat any amendment aimed at opening the Arctic refuge to drilling. Such an amendment is almost certain to be offered by Frank Murkowski of Alaska, but the facts are not on his side. Every available calculation — including those that accept Mr. Murkowski's inflated estimates of the amount of oil underneath the refuge — show that much more oil can be saved by fuel efficiency than by drilling.

I spent 6 years working at one of the big three in an engine group. I left a few years ago, unhappy, so I'm no great friend of the industry. The fact is, we engineers would cheer when we got an improvement of 1/4 mpg increase. It's not special interest groups, it's a combination of physics, customers who demand air conditioning and power everything (weight and power drains), and emissions regulations (require catalysts and other control devices) that keeps the 3 mpg increase from occurring 'easily.' Doesn't he think that GM or Ford would love to advertise that their cars get 3 mpg better mileage than their competitors? An increase of that magnitude would take years and billions.

Now the state board of education, dominated by Davis appointees, would gut Prop. 227. Under current law, kids can get out of English-language classes only if their parents sign waivers. The state board, however, would give teachers the same authority. It would also delete the provision requiring that children spend the first month of each school year in English classrooms.

In short, the bilingual-ed establishment would have limited-English children back in its clutches, where it would condemn them to a mis-education lasting for years — and with consequences lasting for lifetimes. "The combination of these two changes would essentially reestablish California's system of bilingual education for 1.5 million immigrant students," wrote Unz in an e-mail last week.

Last week the board adopted regulations to implement Proposition 227, a 1998 ballot measure that seemingly settled the long-running debate by mandating English immersion for students not proficient in English and placing severe limits on bilingual instruction. And the board also dumped the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation as the defender of Proposition 227 in court and handed the case to Attorney General Bill Lockyer, which 227 backers say could lead to a back-door agreement to eviscerate the measure.

Riordan was a proponent, and financial backer, of Proposition 227, which garnered more than 60 percent of the vote in 1998, including about half of Latino voters. Davis strongly opposed it, although he insisted that he would not undermine what voters wrought. The state school board's actions now give Riordan an opening to allege that Davis is thwarting the voters' will.

Two years after electing Davis governor, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure that banned same-sex marriages. But with the Legislature's dominant Democrats moving leftward, and including more homosexual members, there's a clamor to expand the rights of same-sex couples, edging toward some form of legally recognized unions.

Davis has been playing both sides, continuing his public opposition to gay marriages while cultivating gay rights activists who are an important element of the Democratic Party. At one point, asked during an interview about his tolerance of judges who might disagree on gay marriage, Davis said: "If I appoint people who take contrary positions to the ones I expressed in my campaign -- and I made it very clear in the campaign I was opposed to same-sex marriages -- then democracies don't function."

Privately, Davis has told gay advocates that they'd have to be content with an incremental, go-slow approach that didn't invite a backlash from voters. But as his approval ratings sank last year, he edged leftward to consolidate his voter base in anticipation of a tougher-than-expected re-election battle and signed AB 25, the year's major gay rights bill.

Under the measure, signed in October, domestic partners received a flock of new rights, stopping just shy of Vermont's civil union law. Davis staged a public ceremony for the measure and declared it "about time" to expand gay rights.

The peculiar bond between white nationalist groups and certain Muslim extremists derives in part from a shared set of enemies Jews, the United States, race-mixing, ethnic diversity. It is also very much a function of the shared belief that they must shield their own peoples from the corrupting influence of foreign cultures and the homogenizing juggernaut of globalization. Both sets of groups also have a penchant for far-flung conspiracy theories that caricature Jewish power. . . .

Over the years, these contacts between Nazis and Muslim nationalists developed into dangerous networks that have been implicated in a number of bloody terrorist attacks in Europe and the Middle East. Wealthy Arab regimes have financed extremists in Europe and the United States, just as Western neo-Nazis have helped to build Holocaust denial machinery in the Arab world. In the 1970s, Saudi Arabia hired an American neo-Nazi as a lobbyist in the United States. In the 1980s, U.S. neo-Nazi strategist Louis Beam openly called for a linkup of America's far right with the "liberation movements" of Libya, Syria, Iran and Palestine.

I also fear that if the Muslim community continues to praise terrorism. If it continues to support suicide bombers. If it continues to teach its children hatred. It will soon find itself shunned from the majority of American society much like the Ku Klux Klan. This kind of vicious hatred only serves to marginalize the Muslim community.

According to Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations, the Islamic faith enjoins Muslims to take care of widows and especially orphans. The families of suicide bombers are just as needy as those killed by military attacks, he said.

"They want to make it sound like (all the money is for) the families of suicide bombers," Hooper told United Press International.

Not long ago I spoke at a meeting sponsored by a company’s women’s networking group. Like most other American corporations, this one had a lot of women in entry-level jobs, a fair number of women in middle management and a few women in the top ranks, in a pyramid configuration that has become commonplace.

COMMONPLACE, TOO, WAS THE response of the majority males at the top to this particular evening event. It rankled, this meeting, closed to them in the same way the ranks of management had once been closed to their distaff counterparts. It rankled, even for one night. Apparently none of them saw it as a learning experience, the possibility of imagining for just a few hours what it had been like to be female for many, many years.

Our Daughters to Work Day, which comes around again at the end of this month in what is its 10th anniversary. It’s amazing how the event has become an institution in only a decade, with thousands of companies and millions of girls participating. And it’s amazing how, almost from its inception, the opponents were all over it, complaining that it sent a bad message about female victimhood, that it was based on false research about girls and low self-esteem, above all that it was gender-biased, that the boys were not invited. The same people who weren’t the least bit bothered when boys got the only decent school sports programs—or, for that matter, the entire Supreme Court—were flipping out about a bunch of 13-year-old girls eating in the corporate cafeteria for one afternoon.

“What will we tell the boys?” parents agonized. I never had a bit of trouble explaining: I just remind them that the Senate is still 87 percent male. Boys have issues and problems, too, but they’re not the same as the ones girls have. We just don’t start from the same place; otherwise it wouldn’t be called “helping” when a man performs tasks in his own home, or “baby-sitting” when he looks after his own children. That’s why the most famous remark about Take Our Daughters to Work Day is the one from Eleanor Holmes Norton; when asked why there was no such day for boys, she said it was for the same reason there’s no White History Month.

Women still agonize over balancing work and family; lots of guys still assume they’ll balance work and family by getting married. Boys don’t have to be introduced to the office. They’re old acquaintances. In a survey done for the Ms. Foundation for Women about changing roles, 61 percent of the respondents said they believe men and women are treated differently in the workplace.

You can talk all you want about improved access for women now, but it’s a recent development, and it still stops several steps from most executive suites.

That’s not victimhood, it’s history. And maybe that’s what Take Our Daughters to Work Day has become, a living monument to recent history, to the peaks we’ve struggled up and the plateaus we’re often stuck on. Some of the critics of the day insist darkly that it’s part of the feminist agenda, which is always made to sound like a cross between a coven and a communist cell. (I prefer to think it is dedicated to justice, equality and comfortable shoes.) Ironic, isn’t it; some of those up in arms about the program are women professionals who, if not for the very movement they decry, might have wound up plowing their ambition into casseroles and no-wax floors instead of punditry and sociological research.

Today there are 199 women judges in the federal system; when I was 11, there were three. ... Every time a girl plays Little League, every time a father assumes his daughter is as likely to go to college as his son, every time no one looks twice at a female cop or balks at a female surgeon, it’s a moment in history, radical and ordinary both at the same time.

Critics say that we should talk to girls about their marvelous opportunities instead of taking them out of school and promoting that pesky “feminist agenda” once a year. Pooh. Gavels speak louder than words. Besides, kids are always getting pulled out of school to go to Monticello or chocolate factories or Six Flags. How come there’s an uproar only when the field trip takes girls to a place in which girls were fairly recently unheard of, unwelcome? I remember fondly my daughter toddling around my office during the first Take Our Daughters to Work Day 10 years ago with a pencil in her fist, roaring, “I’m working!” whenever anyone tried to talk to her. There are girls now who are second-generation Takers, who went to work themselves when they were teenagers and are now inviting others. The Ms. Foundation for Women has found a group of those women who say that the event had a major impact on their lives, on the way they saw themselves and envisioned their futures. One day seems a scant investment for that sort of return.

But it will be a long time before we can truly judge the full effects of the program, just as it has taken us decades to appreciate the effects of the feminist revolution. The assumption of access based on ability and not on gender that seemed utopian when we were young has now become the guiding principle of the mainstream, even when it is honored only in the breach. Take Our Daughters to Work Day is as much about our successes as it is about our continued striving. How could it not be? Our successes have remade the world. Welcome to it, girls. The boys may complain. But that will teach you something, too.

“If you do not … you are going to have a proliferation of these organizations. Republicans for Clean Air, Democrats for Clean Air, People Who Do Not Like Any Party for Clean Air, Liberals for Clean Air, Conservatives for Clean Air, Citizens for Dirty Air-I don’t know what it will be. Another example is the Club for Growth. This was an outfit that ran attack ads against moderate Republican congressional candidates in the primary.” - Sen. (Paul) Wellstone, arguing for his amendment on the Senate floor

Why is this scenario so scary to Wellstone and others? Sounds like a free country to me.

Four men who used expired military IDs to trespass into Camp Pendleton were arrested after a late-night food fight Wednesday that destroyed more than 400 pounds of food.

They claimed they were trying to show how lax security is at the base and planned to give the media a videotape of their exploits, said FBI spokeswoman Jan Caldwell.

The four self-employed alarm salesmen were arraigned yesterday in federal court in San Diego on misdemeanor charges of trespassing, malicious mischief, destruction, theft of government property and using a false military pass. They did not enter pleas.

Thousands of miles from the bloodshed, one heard anger, disbelief and a teen-age girl saying that she, too, would blow herself up.

There is no other option, she said yesterday during an Arab-American and Muslim rally to protest the latest developments in the Middle East.

She is 14, a girl of Syrian and Jordanian roots. She wears braces. And she talks of willingly strapping on explosives.

"This is what desperate people do," she said.

It was Ari Fleischer's use of a press conference on the crisis in the Middle East to shill, once again, for the Bush energy plan.

Let me say for starters that energy policy isn't central to this crisis — and to be fair to Mr. Fleischer, he didn't say that it was (he was responding to a question about oil prices). Even if the United States weren't dependent on imported oil, the Middle East would still be a strategically crucial region, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would still be a world nightmare.

But to the extent that oil independence would help — and it would, a bit, by reducing the leverage of Persian Gulf producers — the Bush administration has long since forfeited the moral high ground. It has done so by vigorously opposing any serious efforts at conservation, which would have to be the centerpiece of any real plan to reduce oil imports.

There are many ways to make this case; here are two more. Even at its peak, a decade or so after drilling began, oil production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would reduce imports by no more than would a 3-mile-per-gallon increase in fuel efficiency — something easily achievable, were it not for opposition from special interest groups. Indeed, the Kerry-McCain fuel efficiency standards, which the administration opposed, would have saved three times as much oil as ANWR might produce. Or put it this way: Total world oil production is about 75 million barrels per day, of which the United States consumes almost 20; ANWR would produce, at maximum, a bit more than 1 million.

Yet a few months ago, Republican activists ran ads with side-by-side photos of Tom Daschle and Saddam Hussein, declaring that both men oppose drilling in ANWR — and Dick Cheney, when asked, stood behind those ads. Administration critics could, with rather more justification, run ads with side-by-side photos of George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein, declaring that both men oppose increased fuel efficiency standards. (Actually, I'm not aware that Iraq's ruler has expressed an opinion on either issue.) Of course, if such ads did run, there would be enormous outrage. After all, turnabout wouldn't be fair play because, well, just because.

This isn't the first time the Bush administration has engaged in "hitchhiking," using a crisis to promote a pre-existing agenda that has nothing to do with that crisis. A year ago it was trying to promote drilling in the wildlife refuge as the answer to electricity shortages in California — a connection as far-fetched, if you think about it, as the alleged connection between arctic drilling and the war on terror. And the administration has shamelessly exploited Sept. 11 to cover its fiscal tracks, pretending — in flat contradiction of the facts — that the war on terror is the reason those huge projected surpluses have vanished, and that tax cuts have nothing to do with it.

Needless to say, I don't have the answer to that tragedy. Mr. Bush's speech yesterday gave some reason for hope: at least, for now, he has rejected the advice of sycophants who assure him that tough guys never get caught in quagmires. (Tom DeLay recently declared that if we'd had a leader like Mr. Bush, we would have won the Vietnam War.) But one thing I'm sure of is that this is no time for hitchhiking.

The question is whether Mr. Fleischer and his colleagues understand this. At long last, have they left any sense of decency?

"Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye." Matthew 7:1-6

O'Reilly: Everyone's against Israel except for the United States. Why?

Pipes: Basically because Israel's a very small state with 6 million people that has enemies in the numbers of 200 to 250 million and whether you're looking at trade or looking at votes at the United Nations, or other benefits, you're probably better going off with the 250 million.

O'Reilly: Oh come on, it's got to be more than that. It's got to be more than just numbers. Israel doesn't have any friends? Is it anti-Semitism?

Pipes: There's probably a streak of that too. But the United States is unique in the world, not just in this case, but in all foreign policy, because we have a moral and humanitarian quality to our foreign policy.

O'Reilly: And no other country does? No other country has that?

Pipes: No other country.

O'Reilly: Really, in the whole world no other country....

Pipes: Not Canada. Not Britain. We are unique in this, and you'll find it throughout our history. It's American exceptionalism.

Fighting between Israeli troops and armed Palestinians erupted in Bethlehem late Tuesday with dozens of gunmen forcing their way into the Church of the Nativity, one of the holiest sites in Christianity.

Witnesses said there were dead bodies in front of the church.

"Can you imagine? Can you believe it? They are attacking the Church of Nativity, the Syrian Orthodox Church, and burn and demolish mosques," said Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who remains under siege in his Ramallah headquarters, in an interview with Qatari television.

You compare what Brock wrote about to the Pickering nomination fight and campaign finance reform. Well, do you believe that nomination fights are an exclusively "liberal" issue. Do you have any sense of why there are so many court vacancies now? And campaign finance, another commentor already showed what a non-issue that is.

You want to equate Ted Turner with Richard Mellon Scafe. Where is the evidence that Turner financed the same scandal mongering and blatent lies? Just show me?

You bring up Gingrich, Livingston, Hyde, Iran-Contra. What were the lies here. It has nothing to do with "both sides", it has to do with lying. Why, for instance, did Livingston resign?

You say that Krugman did not disclose his Enron payments? Are you not familiar with the record. Would you like the exact dates of his disclosures?

Further, you entirely miss the point Krugman makes regarding the "scandal machine." The scandals you mention were not dug out of the trash of those people - Livingston, Gingrich, and especially Iran-Contra were conducted by government entities concerned with the actual violation of ethical rules or, in the case of Iran-Contra, the violation of Federal Law. These examples are not nearly the equivalent of a privately-financed investigation into the distant past of the politician in question.

The introductory summary — which, unlike the report itself, is mainly a political document — does its best to make the worst of a good situation. But the bottom line is that the long-run sustainability of Social Security looks better than ever. The staff of the Social Security Administration, using conservative assumptions, now says that the system could operate without any changes at all — no cuts in benefits, no additional revenue — until 2041, three years longer than it projected last year.

The Bush administration's commission on Social Security reform issued its latest report last week, just as Enron entered its death throes. Most of the criticism of that commission's work, my own included, has focused on its, yes, Enron-like accounting: items seem to migrate onto or off the balance sheet to suit the commission's convenience. Thus when the Social Security system takes in more money than it pays out, as it does at present, this has no significance — the federal budget is unified, you see, so it doesn't mean anything when one particular piece of it is in surplus. But in 2016, when the Social Security system starts to pay out more than it takes in, there will be a crisis — Social Security, you see, must stand on its own.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) -- Students lit bonfires, threw bottles, climbed onto business roofs and shot off fireworks after Maryland beat Indiana to win the NCAA tournament.

One reveler was tackled by an ice cream shop employee when he tried to ram a police barricade through the shop's window. Another student was badly cut after getting hit in the head with a bottle.

Bonfires grew in several areas as items were tossed onto the blazes by students milling about.

State agencies and employees are sharing the pain of Gov. Gray Davis' attempt to reduce a numbing $17-billion deficit. No, wait. That doesn't include prison guards. In his new budget Davis not only spares them from belt-tightening, he hikes their pay 33.76% over the next five years. This shower of riches came four years after the guards union helped raise $2.3 million for Davis' first gubernatorial campaign and not long before the guards contributed $251,000 to his reelection. It will boost the guards' average base salary to about $65,000 a year, before overtime, from about $50,000.

There is nothing wrong with paying prison guards well. But proportion matters. Compare that figure to the $47,000 average yearly salary for the state's credentialed public school teachers, who must have a college degree and a year of postgraduate training. Or the pitiful $25,000 or so for a preschool teacher. Correctional officers, unlike even most police officers, need only a high school diploma and four months of training. Ebullient lobbyists for the guards say the raise will "conservatively" cost the state at least half a billion dollars annually by 2006.

Private prisons, first opened by Gov. George Deukmejian in the late 1980s to house minimum-security inmates at lower cost, are not perfect. But they have done well in recent state audits for their job training and community service programs. One is at the 288-bed Baker Community Correctional Facility off Interstate 15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, where inmates trained in basic rescue skills provide fire department emergency staffing for a desolate, accident-plagued stretch of the highway.

With record budget deficits threatening the state, there is growing evidence that private prisons, for some uses, are cost-effective. How can politicians ignore this alternative? The answer remains what it has been for years: Follow the political clout and the campaign money.