George Will, Rastafarian
Things are a little slow even for a Sunday when two of the majors working
the weekend lead with local stories--the Los Angeles
Times goes with a water dispute between L.A. and San Diego, and the
Washington Post with a school budget story. The
New York Times
lead is a fairly mundane account of how the various spending bills are faring
in Congress, which does however contain the news that in contrast to the
dilatory rancor of the past few years, the House has already approved eight of
the thirteen necessary authorizing bills, and the Senate, ten.
On the NYT 's front there's a story about the two teachers, one black,
one white, who are at the center of the reverse discrimination in hiring case
that will be taken up by the Supreme Court in the fall. In 1989, the
Piscataway, New Jersey school board, faced with having to lay off one of them,
chose to retain the black because she was the only black faculty member in her
department. Since then, the Times reports, due to a staff retirement,
the fired teacher is back at the school, so that now the two women teach in
adjoining classrooms and share an office and a telephone. They do not, however,
speak.
According to a front-page story in the LAT , the Clinton
administration has made one very direct commitment to moving people from
welfare to work: It seems that last May, the White House mail room hired a
29-year-old welfare mother.
Politics has never made stranger bedfellows than in George Will's WP
column in which on libertarian grounds, he defends the right of
African-American hair care practitioners to administer unlicensed
"sisterlocks."
The WP reports that "after three days of intensive investigation,
federal officials said they have yet to find any link between Middle East
terrorist groups and two suspects arrested Thursday in an alleged suicide-bomb
plot to attack New York subways." Furthermore, says the Post , "A
statement today that purports to speak for Hamas denied that the group had
anything to do with the two Palestinian suspects...." And perhaps because
policy nuances tend to get lost amidst all the funerals and severed limbs, the
statement added that Hamas "does not act hostilely towards the American
people."
According to a piece inside the NYT , the CIA is offering a new reason
why the government wasn't lying about UFOs when it said there was nothing to
the hundreds of UFO sighting reports made over the years--namely, it was lying
about something else. It turns out the spooks knew that a lot of those
sightings were of the then-totally-secret U-2 and SR-71 spyplanes.
The WP front features a story about how various ex-members of
Congress were crucial lobbyists on the budget bills. Including, it seems,
former Sen. Bob Packwood, who successfully lobbied on behalf of lumber mills
and other small businesses for a cut in the estate tax. Do you think Packwood
was thinking about the tax code when he told the Post , "There's always
moments you miss when you're not on the inside."?
