Beattying Around the Bush
USA Today leads with the Supreme
Court's decision to take on for the first time the question of whether
grandparents have the right to visit their grandchildren even when one or both
parents object, which is also the top non-local story at the Los Angeles Times . The LAT lead also covers the court's decision to review the Violence
Against Women Act, a recent federal hate crime law that gives victims of sexual
assaults the right to sue their tormentors for money damages. The Wall Street
Journal's sum-up of the court's new term describes the VAWA case and
several others, including one testing a Colorado law making it a crime to
counsel, protest, or communicate within 8 feet of a person within 100 feet of
an abortion clinic, and one about how to apply the three-year IRS statute of
limitations to refunds, but reserves its headline for one concerning the legal
liability of managed care companies accused of cutting costs and doesn't
mention the grandparenting case. The Washington Post
goes with yesterday's passage by the House and Senate of a continuing
resolution that keeps the government running through Oct. 21. This means,
explains the paper, that Congress and the White House have bought time to work
out their myriad differences on expenditures without bringing about a
government shutdown. The New York Times
leads with the failure of Mexico's opposition parties to agree to back a single
presidential candidate, thus auguring the continued dominance of the party that
has elected every Mexican president since the 1920s. This story is also fronted
by the LAT .
The WP , NYT , and LAT front what the latter
calls Bill Bradley's "first detailed policy speech," outlining his health-care
plan, which would extend coverage to lower-income citizens by allowing them to
join at little or no cost the federal government's health insurance system or
by providing tax credits toward their private plan premiums. The
WSJ runs a "Politics and Policy" piece on the
proposal. The papers point out that the plan is more ambitious than the one
unveiled by Al Gore a few weeks ago, in that Bradley's attempts to make health
care available not just to children but to nearly all currently non-covered
adults.
The NYT front says one
reason the U.S. investigation into possible laundering of Russian money through
the Bank of New York has been so halting is that two of the law enforcement
bodies with responsibilities in the case--the Manhattan D.A.'s office and the
FBI--have not been cooperating with each other. That's putting it mildly-- the
Times reports that each of the two outfits even
discussed filing obstruction charges against the other.
The WP fronts, and the
NYT runs inside (crediting early editions of the
WP ), the death of an 18-year-old man while
undergoing gene therapy for a metabolic disease. Although, explain the papers,
many Americans have by now been treated by such experimental techniques, this
is the first death associated with them. The victim had a mild form of a
genetic disorder that was well controlled with drugs and diet, but he
volunteered for the experimental therapy hoping it would lead to a cure. Both
papers are careful to point out that so far it is not known if the therapy was
the cause of death. The NYT is more firm about
saying that if this is indeed the case it could be a severe setback for gene
therapy.
The LAT fronts and the
other majors put inside the latest assessment of the writing skills of American
students. The bottom line is that only a quarter of them are proficient in
writing, and only about 1 percent are advanced. The stories also note a
significant gender gap, with girls handily outscoring boys at all grade levels.
The reader will look in vain for comparisons to results from prior years, but
as the stories explain, the tests given this year are the first of their kind
and so cannot be meaningfully compared to previous writing scores.
A column by the WP's
David Ignatius and an inside story at the NYT
reveal that the CIA has come up with a new way to help the agency keep pace
with the explosion of information technology and get better connected to the
young brilliant minds that are powering it. It is starting up an information
technology venture fund, to be called "In-Q-It," with a field office in Palo
Alto, Calif., that will partner with other companies to develop such things as
better intel-related search engines and improved computer security.
The NYT reefers President
Clinton's remarks Tuesday at the same prayer breakfast where a year ago he
confessed that he had "sinned" in the Lewinsky matter. Yesterday, Clinton
thanked his wife (seated nearby), his daughter, and his circle of religious
advisers, saying, "I have been profoundly moved, as few people have, by the
pure power of grace, unmerited forgiveness through grace." The
WP runs the story inside.
The WSJ "Tax Report" says
the Treasury Department is reiterating its opposition to the repeal of the
estate tax, pointing out that fewer than 2 percent of those who die each year
leave estates large enough to be subject to it. A letter writer to the
WP makes a wholly different but equally striking
tax observation: The idea that smokers impose a net cost on society and
therefore should have to pay higher taxes (say, though an increased cigarette
tax) is wrong. The Congressional Research Service, he writes, has concluded
that "all in all, smoking has apparently brought gain to both federal and state
governments." For one thing he adds, the New England
Journal of Medicine concluded that "smoking cessation would lead to
increased health care costs."
The New York
Times fronts and gives its "Life" section "cover story" over to the
question of whether Warren Beatty might declare his presidential
candidacy in a speech he made in L.A. last night post-press-time. It seems odd
not to have merely waited until tomorrow to report rather than wonder. An
indicator of the paucity of actual information available about Beatty's
thinking is the following simultaneously filed pair of observations.
USAT : "After all, this is the man about whom
Carly Simon was rumored to have written the hit 1972 song, You're So Vain."
NYT : "He is, after all, one of the men about whom
an old girlfriend, Carly Simon, wrote You're So Vain."
