Smoke and Ice
The UPS strike makes everybody's front page, but only leads at USA Today .
The Los
Angeles Times leads with California's passage of a welfare reform bill
that would for the first time ever subject state recipients to strict time
limits and work requirements, along with a companion measure that would ban
from the rolls for life anyone convicted of a drug felony. The New York Times leads with word that "a federal
advisory panel has decided to recommend abolishing the troubled Immigration and
Naturalization Service and assigning its duties to other government agencies."
And the Washington Post leads with President Clinton's decision to
sign an executive order later this week dramatically broadening the ban on
smoking in the federal workplace.
The presidential smoking ban would, says the WP , "set a standard
policy across the government and extend existing prohibitions to places
currently exempt, such as military officers' clubs." Some exceptions would
remain, such as military barracks and "undercover, military or diplomatic
situations that are essential to accomplish agency missions." (Spies, thank
God, can still smoke.)
The NYT runs a front-page piece that may signal the beginning of a
major environmental development. British Petroleum, the world's third-largest
oil company, announced that "there is now enough scientific evidence to warrant
concern about whether human activity--primarily the burning of fossil fuels
like coal, oil and natural gas--is changing Earth's climate." This is a break
from oil and gas companies' monolithic denial of a global warming problem and
thus may have policy ripples akin to the separate catalytic course taken in
tobacco and health issues by Liggett Myers.
The Post front features a behind-the-scenes account of the
negotiations leading to the budget deal. Top revelations include that at one
point, Gingrich was so stressed out that he went off his diet, and that at
another, he successfully smoothed over ruffled Democratic feathers by sending
over inscribed copies of his two books. Also, in one phone call, Rep. John
Kasich told Clinton lobbyist John Hilley that, "...if we don't get a deal by
the beginning of the recess, I'm [expletive] coming over and burning your house
down!"
In other congressional news, the Wall Street Journal 's main front-page feature takes a
one-year-later look at Congress's reform of doing away with ice deliveries to
member's offices, a move that Gingrich claimed saved $500,000 a year. It turns
out that the ice is still being distributed, and the Journal wonders how
any savings have been accomplished since the delivery work is now done, not by
the maintenance personnel who used to do it--and who still watch over the ice
and log its movements--but by higher-paid congressional staffers.
A NYT front-page piece describes the efforts being made on behalf of
Malcolm Shabazz by New York power brokers and family friends David Dinkins and
Percy Sutton, revealing that the two men, in attempting to favorably work out
details of Shabazz's upcoming juvenile sentence, have been "sharing the back
seat of a chauffeured black sedan,...combing the country for a place secure
enough to satisfy the judge, therapeutic enough to satisfy the psychiatrists
and academic enough to satisfy their ambitions..." The paper quotes Sutton as
saying, "I tell him he can be a king, he can go to West Point, he can do
anything he wants if we can get through this problem we have now." But the
twelve-year old wants something else, says the Times --to be a
lawyer.
