GOP Ames for White House
The Washington
Post and the Los
Angeles Times lead with Gov. George W. Bush's victory in the Iowa
Straw Poll. Nearly 25,000 voting Iowans descended on Ames for a day of food,
entertainment, and politics that, according to the LAT , confirmed most
expectations about the Republican presidential race. The New York Times , which
also fronts Iowa, leads instead with a report that patients slighted by HMOs
are having greater success bringing their grievances to court. The WP
fronts President Clinton's announcement that the Environmental Protection
Agency will demand that states intensify efforts to combat water pollution. The
LAT runs two follow-up stories to last week's Jewish community center
shooting. The first sets the diversity of the medical team that saved Benjamin
Kadish against the alleged gunman's racism; a sidebar reports heated debate
over whether or not the federal government should confront extremists more
aggressively.
Bush took 31 percent of the mock votes cast at the Iowa State University
basketball arena, followed by Steve Forbes with 21 percent, and Elizabeth Dole
with 14 percent. Places four through nine went respectively to Gary Bauer, Pat
Buchanan, Lamar Alexander, Dan Quayle, Alan Keyes, and Sen. Orrin Hatch.
Bush's less than overwhelming margin of victory in the mock election does not
reflect current opinion polls elsewhere: The NYT reports that Bush led a
New Hampshire poll 40 percent to Sen. John McCain's 10 percent. Forbes outspent
everyone ($2 million), hoping to emerge from Ames as Bush's sole competitor,
according to the WP . All three papers note that Dole's solid finish
beat back fears that her candidacy might not survive a poorer showing. The
WP article mentions twice that Bush delivered a recycled speech. Sen.
John McCain, who dismissed the event as a "sham," will concentrate instead on
California and New Hampshire in coming weeks, the NYT reports in its
"Political Briefing" column.
The NYT lead suggests that members of HMOs are beginning to have
greater success suing for medical malpractice. Over the last 20 months, judges
have started to let patients sue, but not for punitive damages--only for the
value of the denied benefits. Attorneys have found ways to sidestep a 1974 law
that shields the organizations from liability for their decisions. A recent
Senate bill granting protections to some HMO members awaits a presidential
veto.
Clinton announced yesterday that the EPA will force states to clean up
20,000 rivers, lakes, and bays currently too dirty to swim or fish in, the
Post and the NYT report. State regulators will determine the
level to which pollution must be reduced in a body of water and then assign
quotas to individual polluters. The latter would then have to cut back
emissions or buy discharge rights from someone polluting below allowed
level.
The LAT continues its detailed coverage of atrocities in Kosovo with
a report that some Kosovars may be waging an organized ethnic cleansing
campaign. Citing local and Western sources, the paper says that patterns have
emerged in vandalism, threats made to Serbs, and execution-style killings. The
NYT reports that NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo are stepping up their
campaign to disarm and perhaps dismantle the Kosovo Liberation Army.
The NYT and the WP front obituaries of Lane Kirkland, former
president of the AFL-CIO, who died of lung cancer at the age of 77. Kirkland
expanded the labor federation's influence abroad (for example, by sending money
and equipment to Poland's Solidarity movement), but is said to have neglected
domestic issues, the NYT reports.
The NYT Magazine runs its second Russian-related cover story of the
summer. John Lloyd explores political fallout in Washington (and on the
presidential campaign trail) from botched Western policy initiatives undertaken
in post-Soviet Russia. Bush's top foreign-policy specialist faults the
Clinton-Gore administration with clinging to Russian reformers' empty rhetoric.
The Bush camp will propose that the U.S. step away from Russian internal
affairs. Robert Kaiser also plays the blame game in the WP : He asks if
U.S. dependence on Yeltsin jeopardized the nation's relationship to Russia.
The NYT and the WP run front-page accounts of grotesque
mistreatment of children abroad. The former paper says that in Japan, reported
cases of child abuse are rising against a backdrop of record unemployment and
increasing divorce and remarriage rates. Legislators may scale back laws that
give families significant autonomy and power. A WP front-pager peeks
inside Russian orphanages for the mentally disabled--or "Gulags for the
Children." The piece details the nightmarish conditions under which children in
these borderline institutions live.
D'oh!: If owners get their way, the grounds of the defunct Trojan
nuclear plant in Rainier, Ore., may become a new state park, according to an AP
story in the Post . The plant is thought by many locals to be the
inspiration for Homer Simpson's workplace because of its proximity to Matt
Groening's hometown. (The show denies a link.) Despite hundreds of acres of
woods and rich wildlife, skeptics wonder who would feel safe enough to camp
there. Link or no link, maybe the skeptics will find comfort in that the
Simpsons have lived near an unsafe plant for so long without any adverse
effects on their health.
