Bush II: Reality vs. DREAMS

...Similarly, while Powell promised greater attention to Africa, there was no hint that he has a better idea than anyone else about how to deal with civil war in Congo and the assassination of its leader, Laurent Kabila...

...Secretary Powell says relations with Russia will depend on its efforts to get on with reform...

...In 1974 Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, a friend of President Richard M. Nixon, joined in a unanimous ruling obliging Nixon to release the Oval Office tapes that led to his undoing...

...America's population has increased 13.2 per cent since the 1990 census, which is more than was predicted...

...Saddam Hussein might have been a little hyperbolic when he bragged on television of Iraq's triumph in the six-week war that drove his forces out of Kuwait...

...By contrast, the Russia State Statistics Committee reports that Russia's population has been declining by about 750,000 annually since the Soviet collapse in 1991, bringing it down to 145 million...

...At odds with European and other allies on everything from trade to missile defense to Balkan peacekeeping...

...Nor would every Justice own up to partisanship by declaring that the recounted votes "threaten irreparable harm to petitioner (Governor Bush) and to the country...

...Candidate Bush talked of taking out any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that may be discovered...

...forces from Bosnia and Kosovo is being soft-pedaled...

...That Bill Clinton felt uncomfortable about the way he was exercising his sweeping power is indicated by the fact that he bypassed the Justice Department, which usually vets clemency applications...

...Denise Rich contributed a million dollars to the campaigns of President Clinton and other Democrats, and helped raise another $300,000 for Democratic candidates...

...That enabled it to decide three days later that there was no more time left for vote counting...

...Although Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed the hope that the peace talks can be kept on track, he did not immediately say what role the United States would play in them...

...First the junta on Saturday stopped the vote count...

...Rich's lawyers said he gave a lot to charity, yet so did Michael Milken, who received no mercy...

...They pleaded with Clinton for clemency for their colleagues...

...The dawn of the Bush II era in Congress is likely to be further complicated by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain's succeeding in making campaign funding reform an early order of business, and by the fractious debate over the confirmation of John Ashcroft as Attorney General...

...Indeed, one of the great ironies of his family succession is that President Bush the Elder left behind an Iraq supposedly defeated in the fighting that started 10 years ago on January 17, and Bush the Younger—with two of his father's Gulf War aides, Dick Cheney and General Powell, by his side—has come to town to find the challenge of a resurgent Iraq on his doorstep...

...It suppressed the recount for good...

...One can imagine him telling his father, "Gee, Dad, I wish you had finished the job...

...Clinton also reduced the sentences of four Chasidic men whose sect supported his wife's senatorial campaign...

...Nevertheless, it is a fact that he has survived, rebuilt his conventional forces, and developed who knows what weapons of mass destruction...

...Putin has announced plans to eliminate all except a handful of Russia's 186 political parties, and he has been proceeding with a crackdown on the free press...

...Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota has said, "We are willing to negotiate...

...But indulge me in this comment: In Third World countries such as Pakistan, Chile and Sierra Leone, a transfer of power is often accomplished by military coup...

...That would move it from the seventh most populated country in the world to the 14th...

...The Democrats are pushing a smaller tax package, targeted more to middleclass families...

...The prospects for international support are not great...

...In any event, now the President and his aides have to decide how to deal with Saddam...

...That legitimacy is something the tribunal has consistently enjoyed almost alone among American institutions of government...

...The population shift to the sunny climes continues and Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona will pick up two House seats each, California one...

...In the last decade, Russian life expectancy has dropped from 69 to 66 years...

...It has not so far shown any great interest in negotiating with the Democratic Senate and House leadership, preferring to seek the support of individual Democrats...

...The fix was in, all right, but a different fix...

...Meanwhile, no-fly zones are hardly being enforced, sanctions are being widely ignored, and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is scheduled to meet with Iraqi representatives toward the end of February about the formal lifting of sanctions in return for some kind of weapons inspection acceptable to Saddam...

...Decades of conservative support of states' rights—by overturning Federal statutes from affirmative action to Federal review of criminal cases — went out the window in an arrogation of authority to rule on the voting in Florida...

...The Gang of Five Time has marched on since December 15, when the Supreme Court halted the vote count in Florida and opened the way to another Bush Presidency...

...During the same period the country's health care system has been disintegrating...

...It would include eliminating the marriage tax "penalty" and the inheritance tax...

...This reinstated a prohibition that President Bill Clinton had lifted...

...Indicted for defrauding the government in an oil-trading scheme, racketeering and trading illegally with Iran during the hostage crisis, they have been on the lam in Europe for 18 years...

...Clinton's Last Scandal In the midst of the inaugural events on January 20 came the last-minute Clinton pardons and commutations...

...For the moment, talk of an early withdrawal of U.S...

...In our country, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy in 1998 was 76.7 years, up from 74.9 a decade earlier...

...They stated in their opinion that overturning Roe v. Wade would do "profound and unnecessary damage to the Court's legitimacy...

...The Administration appears to be in no mood for grand compromises...

...The departing President's last scandal in office, you might say, and Hillary Rodham Clinton's first...

...But they are not isolated improprieties...

...He will surely find, though, as did his predecessors, that crises suddenly blow up in the most unexpected places...

...Bush II may well be reflecting on the wisdom of precipitately ending the Gulf War...

...Economic depression and declining health explain the descent...

...15 years ago the rate was 1 in 20...

...If only one of the five had defected, the contest could have been returned to limbo...

...The Palestinian National Authority appeared to be making an overture to the new Administration when an e-mail message that also was posted on its Web site condemned the Clinton peacemaking record as tilting toward Israel and "disastrous," but two days later Chairman Yasir Arafat disavowed the message...

...Those unpardonable acts will not do any good for Clinton's already flawed legacy, or for Senator Clinton's record...

...And it means that the oldest of the 79 million baby boomers, who have reached the age of 54, can count on an active life for many more years to come...

...Russia has been trying to take the measure of President Bush, and there are signs that President Vladimir V Putin would welcome a period of "benign neglect...

...I will admit that health and demographic comparisons with Russia are much more satisfying than comparisons with the Western European countries...

...His first big decision, due in April, is whether to sell destroyers and other advanced weapons to Taiwan over the opposition of mainland China...

...There are national security implications for Russia...

...In 1992 Reagan appointees Sandra Day O'Connor and Arthur M. Kennedy, and Bush appointee Souter cast the swing votes that preserved the constitutional right of abortion...

...That seemed to leave open the chance of fixing the system...

...Indications are that major legislative proposals will be introduced first and a bipartisan consensus will be sought, if at all, afterward...

...Clinton received financial and other support from New Square, a community of some 7,000 Chasidim in New York's Rockland County...

...Justices have not always been beholden to politicians...

...The crucial difference is that the Democrats would convert low-performing public schools into charter schools, while Bush proposes giving parents $1,500 per child that could be spent at private or parochial schools...

...Education is likely to be the first test of this approach...

...He also talked with out-ofoffice Democratic elders like former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert S. Strauss and former Senators John H Glenn of Ohio and Paul Simon of Illinois...

...Justice John Paul Stevens, for the embattled minority consisting of himself, Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David H. Souter, said that halting the vote recount "will inevitably cast a cloud on the legitimacy of the election...

...But none did...

...No action is likely to be taken on such matters until the Administration's National Security team gets up to speed...

...Not every Justice would say, as he did, that the issuance of the voting stay suggested Bush had "a substantial probability of success...

...But the world did not stand still and will eventually claim his attention...

...At the core, they are part of the larger corruption of political money and what it buys...

...If we ever get campaign finance reform, maybe we can be rid of clemency for sale...

...On the Global Front It is no surprise that President Bush spent his first days in the White House concentrating on domestic initiatives like education reform...

...The Administration avoids the word "vouchers" and speaks, rather, of "scholarships" or "parental choice...

...In her successful bid for a Senate seat, Mrs...

...That means an American can expect to live 10 years longer than a Russian...

...It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law...

...She followed up her letter with a phone call to the White House—to whom, she did not say...

...But, then, they don't call themselves superpowers...

...Undo" has come first...

...Infectious diseases—diphtheria, dysentery, cholera, HIV—are on the rise...

...That allowed the Republican Guard to flee to safety and let Saddam Hussein use his fleet of helicopters to massacre Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south of Iraq...

...On its tax cut proposal, designated as the theme of the second week, the Administration succeeded early in peeling off Democratic Senator Zell Miller of Georgia to co-sponsor, with Republican Phil Gramm of Texas, a bill embodying the President's ideas for reducing taxes by $ 1.6 trillion...

...National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has talked of supporting the Iraqi opposition, something the Clinton Administration was already doing...

...Secretary of State Powell said in his confirmation hearing that the President wants sanctions to be reenergized...

...But the census reports also tell us something else important about the state of our nation, especially when compared with recent demographic data from Russia...

...In an advanced country like ours, it is done by judicial coup...

...One thing about Tony Scalia, who once said on a tennis court, "Five-four, I win," he levels with you...

...But it is still learning the ropes...

...In late December she brought their Grand Rabbi and other leaders to the White House for a meeting with the President in the Map Room...

...Russian democratic scholars say that any evidence of the United States drawing into itself would encourage Putin's autocratic streak...

...There was a general perception that the black-robed nine marched to different drummers, that they hearken to the law and Constitution, wrapped in the Court's tradition and collegiality...

...We enter the new millennium with a record total of 281,421,906 people...

...The President met with Republican Senate and House leaders to discuss his legislative agenda on his first working day...

...A Study in Contrasts What we know first from the results of the year 2000 census, because of redistricting requirements, is the effect of demographic changes on Congressional representation...

...Education reform was to have been the theme of the President's debut week...

...Admitting here to something less than cool dispassion, I marvel at the way the current Supreme Court's gang of five, philosophically led by archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia, tried to camouflage their operation behind a nominal 72 agreement that there was something wrong with the Florida recount...

...The initial approach to Congress did not signal a high priority for bipartisanship either...

...The tactics were adroit...

...One in three draftees is rejected for health reasons today...

...Later he said we may never know who was the winner of the Presidential race, but "the identity of the loser is perfectly clear...

...Russia is expected to shrink by another 11 million people in the next 15 years...

...The President has outlined a proposal for overhauling the system of Federal school funding that seems close, in many respects, to what a group of Democrats led by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut is urging...

...The Administration will have to demonstrate it means that...

...That would permit him to pursue his own authoritarian policies...

...But the Administration seems to be leaning toward the strategy adopted in 1981 by President Ronald Reagan, who won a huge tax cut with the aid of the so-called "boll weevil" Democrats...

...President Dwight D. Eisenhower, after leaving office in 1961, said his greatest mistake was appointing Earl Warren and William J. Brennan to the Court, because they sparked a liberal revolution...

...They had been convicted of inventing a fictitious Jewish religious schoolandripping off the government of millions of dollars in aid...

...Only Mexico and Canada lie in his early travel plans...

...instead, his first official act was a bow to the Christian Right on January 22, the 28th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision legalizing abortion: The White House announced the banning of funds for international family planning groups that even counsel on abortion...

...Now that legitimacy has been endangered...

...She says she merely sat by...

...Having plea-bargained his own way out of possible indictment, Clinton issued pardons for multimillionaire Marc Rich and his partner, Pincus Green...

...The early signs from the Bush II Administration suggest tension between the President's stated aim of achieving "shared accomplishments" and his need to draw quick conservative lines in the sand...

...It is not clear that the Administration is ready for any "shared achievement" on taxes...

...This means the vast territory does not have much more than half the population of the United States...

...The President himself seems bent on dipping his toes into international waters slowly...

...More to the point, Rich's pardon application was accompanied by a letter from his ex-wife...

...Fine...

...The Court's intervening in the white-hot controversy over the Presidency has made it vulnerable to suspicion of partisanship...

...With no clear mandate from the voters—a fact that went unmentioned in the Inaugural Address—George W. Bush appears intent on pursuing a laundry list of things to do and things to undo...

...without making any official recommendation...

...But he put off a meeting with Democratic Congressional leaders for two days, and thenhad their Republican counterparts present as well...

...Bush will have trouble assembling the broad coalition against Iraq that his father forged so spectacularly...