Phone Bill
The Washington Post leads with news the Russian mob is going
international in a big way. USA Today goes with the formation of a new coalition
of teacher and parent groups dedicated to saving the public schools. And the
New York Times
lead is: "Mideast Leaders Taking First Step to Reviving Talks" (that's key F4
on Times keyboards, right next to F5: "Teamster Officials
Indicted").
According to the WP , U.S., European and Latin American law
enforcement officials say that Russian organized crime groups, operating out of
Miami, New York and Puerto Rico and flush with cash, are forming alliances with
Colombian drug traffickers in the Caribbean. These alliances, say some experts
quoted in the piece, are the most dangerous trend in drug smuggling in the
hemisphere. The Russian mobs offer the drug cartels access to sophisticated
weapons siphoned from the Soviet inventory. Recent undercover operations have
detected, says the paper, attempts by Russian groups to sell Colombian drug
lords a helicopter, surface-to-air missiles and a submarine. The Russians are
especially dangerous, one DEA Russian expert tells the WP , because "We
are talking [about] people with PhDs, former senior KGB agents with access to
sophisticated weapons, people who have [already] laundered billions of
dollars."
USAT heralds the formation today of the Learning First Alliance of
teachers, principals, parents, school boards, experts and community leaders,
which is dedicated to improving public school education. The Alliance includes
such educational policy power players as the NEA and the AFT and its principal
goals include establishing tougher course work and making schools safer. The
group will be holding a summit in Washington in January to address improving
reading and math achievement.
The Wall Street Journal 's Alan Murray observes in a front-page
"The Outlook" column that now with the diminution of the tobacco lobby, in
Washington the most influential lobby is broadcasting. For proof, Murray points
to the fate of the concept of free television time for political ads. Once a
staple of campaign reform legislation, it is now MIA, because "broadcasters
complained" and "members of Congress cowered."
The NYT reports that cancer rates for children are on the rise:
nowadays a newborn child has a 1 in 600 chance of contracting the disease by
age 10. Experts tend to implicate increased environmental exposure to
carcinogens.
After virtually ignoring the IRS hearings story last week when the other
majors had it splashed all over their front pages, today the WP goes
front page with the news that, as a direct result of testimony revealing agency
abuses given at those hearings, the IRS has suspended a number of mid-level
managers. The paper also reports that the hearings have given the flat tax a
new life on the Hill.
The NYT reports on its front page that the Clinton and Gore
fund-raising calls now causing such a political furor produced far smaller
contribution totals than they were supposed to. The principal problem was, it
seems, that neither the president nor the VP was comfortably in bluntly asking
for the sums the professional fundraisers specified. And the fund-raisers were
convinced their goals could have been met if Clinton would have made more calls
himself. So they came up with the concept of a "touch-up call" in which Clinton
would call potential donors and talk about everything but money. That
was handled by fund-raisers asking for large contributions in orchestrated
follow-up calls. "The answer," says the Times , "was almost always
yes."
It was easy to get Clinton to make touch-up calls, a Democratic fund-raiser
told the paper: "The president loves to schmooze on the phone."
