Bottoms Up
The New York Times
leads with Janet Reno's announcement that she's expanding her inquiry into Al
Gore's fund-raising phone calls. USA Today leads with the news that juvenile violent
crime has dropped more than 9 percent in the past year, the Los Angeles
Times with the word that the U.S. is likely to OK nuclear power deals
between U.S. firms and China, and the Washington Post with the news that President Clinton is
about to propose civilian review boards to oversee the IRS.
The Times reports that while deciding to go forward on Gore, Reno
rejected the need for an independent counsel to investigate Bill Clinton's
White House coffees and Lincoln Bedroom-visit arrangements. Reno has till the
middle of the month before deciding whether or not to expand her inquiry into
Clinton's fund-raising phone calls.
The NYT also reveals that one of the attorneys Gore has hired to help
with his mounting problems is doing the work pro bono. The lawyer , James Neal,
says the practice is legal and ethical. The WP front-page piece about
Reno's decision has virtually all the same information, except that the
Post missed the Gore-pro bono tidbit.
However, the Post does break ground in a long front-page piece about
the disarray surrounding what it calls the DOJ's "crippled" 11-month
investigation into White House fund raising. The core problem apparently was
that the FBI wanted to focus on the president, vice president, and other senior
officials, but the Justice Department attorneys wanted a "bottom up"
investigation. (The DOJ lawyers are defending their point of view in the
Wall Street Journal 's "Washington Wire," saying the
case against naming a special prosecutor is "pretty strong.") As a result, says
the paper, the task force didn't even interview senior officials for eight
months, and the information that may eventually result in the appointment of an
independent counsel came not from the task force but from a "newspaper
account." (Apparently, modesty is still on the style-sheet at the House of
Graham--that newspaper was the Post .)
The LAT 's story about China's nuke trade opening says that the new
U.S. stance comes "amid intensive lobbying by the U.S. nuclear industry." A
company the paper names as a likely beneficiary is Westinghouse. Also, it is
revealed that the administration's OK will probably be given at Clinton's Cot.
28-29 meeting in Washington with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Jesse Helms,
the LAT says, criticizes the deal, saying it would stand as a "testament
to the role financial interests play in the U.S. policy toward China." The
story's details suggest he has a point, inasmuch as it relates that China is
still providing missile and chemical/biological warfare technology to Iran and
Pakistan.
Meanwhile the front pages of both the WP and the NYT national
edition state that the Defense Department has given the green light to
test-firing a powerful laser at a satellite orbiting some 200-plus miles up.
The State Department had been against the idea, particularly because of concern
about what moving forward in this weapons area would do to Russia's attitude
toward the latest arms-reduction treaty, START II, which Russia hasn't ratified
yet. Both papers reveal that the laser is known by the Strangelovian MIRACL for
"Mid-Wave Infrared Chemical Laser." (There's a sneaking suspicion here that the
acronym came first, followed by the billions required to make a weapon that
fits it.)
The WSJ explains that U.S. representatives at the Kyoto
global-warming talks will be singing the praises of pollution credit markets,
which, the EPA says, have contributed to a 30-percent drop in sulfur-dioxide
emissions here just since 1994. Something this powerful is needed for all
greenhouse gases, since as a chart accompanying the piece points out, the U.S.
is the world's biggest CO2 emitter, producing almost twice as much as China,
and at a per capita 10 times greater.
(A thought: Maybe there's a solution here to the cloud of graft and
corruption hanging over Washington: scandal credits.)
