Scrapbook

...Daschle, said of Mr...

...The magazine suggests that the Service has a notable alcoholism problem...

...According to Ragavan & Co., it seems there is widespread suspicion among Secret Service line agents that their agency's notorious assertion of "protective function privilege" during Ken Starr's Lewinsky investigation was not designed to protect President Clinton from embarrassing sexual disclosures...

...But for some reason it has otherwise largely escaped notice...

...It will be interesting to see if he now decides to use that power to put the Democratic party on record in favor of, or against, the faith-based initiative...

...Nothing, except the terrorist didn't have an obvious accomplice at the airport...

...Quacks Like a Terrorist All day on July 4 and well into the next day, FBI and local officials insisted the shooting in front of the El Al counter at Los Angeles Airport wasn't terrorism, that it was the act of a lone assailant...

...How did law enforcement officials and the press know this...

...Consider what law enforcement officials found when they rushed the airport...

...Wait, we're just getting started...

...News and World Report...

...Bush...

...For all the FBI knew on the day of the shooting, the LAX terrorist might have been working with Hamas, the Al-Aksa Brigade, or al Qaeda...

...A man with Middle Eastern looks had gotten in the line at El Al, the Israeli airline, and killed two people before being shot to death himself...

...So what did investigators quickly conclude...

...It was obviously a terrorist act and officials should have recognized it even before the disclosure that the assailant was an Egyptian immigrant who was angry over America's response to September 11...

...That Secret Service field offices have more than once been visited by professional strippers...

...No, the thinking goes, then-Secret Service chief Lew Merletti tried to block his employees from talking to the grand jury because he was afraid his own extramarital affair with a White House staffer might be revealed...

...Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel carry out their deeds alone, but they are backed by dozens who arm, train, and dispatch them...

...Faith-based Daschle...

...And so forth...

...Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle will decide either to support the president's faith-based initiative, as embodied in the CARE Act, or to scuttle it...

...The internship is being funded by the estate of Isabel Johnson Hiss, Alger's second wife...

...He was armed with two guns, a knife, and plenty of bullets...

...And that yet another agent, A.T...

...So what made the FBI and other officials think he acted alone...

...Not exactly confidence-inspiring...

...He killed innocent people for political reasons: That's terrorism...

...These would have been plausible, though only barely, if the shooting had occurred at the United or Continental counter...

...That agents on the White House Counter Assault Team watch pornographic movies in the basement of the Executive Mansion...

...An Internship to Leave Off Your Resume As if interns hadn't gotten enough bad press in recent years, along comes the Center for Constitutional Rights to make things worse...

...Smith, was sleeping with yet another White House aide while he was in charge of Hillary Clinton's personal detail...

...The Washington Post said they "were checking reports from witnesses that the gunman may have been a disgruntled former employee of the airline or the airport, or may have had a dispute over identification in the ticket line...

...The story has so far inspired a handful of not-very-funny late-night television jokes...

...U.S...

...Daschle seems to like the bill...

...They didn't...

...News reports that a Secret Service agent guarding former President Reagan has been convicted of statutory rape— involving a 16-year-old girl—and violently resisting arrest while in possession of methamphetamine...

...It recently was passed by the Senate Finance Committee...

...That agents have recently been convicted of embezzlement and welfare fraud...

...Yet when the president last week urged an immediate vote on the CARE Act, he received a cold response from Daschle's office...

...The New York Times reported that "the Majority Leader is in no hurry to bring the bill to a vote, despite the President's call for the Senate to act quickly...

...Last I checked he wasn't the Majority Leader of the Senate,' Ranit Schmeltzer, a spokeswoman for Mr...

...Which is worse than a pity, because if reporter Chitra Ragavan and her colleagues are to be believed—and why shouldn't they be?—the federal agency charged with protecting our president's life is on the verge of abject functional and moral collapse...

...News reports that a drug-abusing street criminal wound up dead in one Secret Service agent's apartment after an evening of sex...

...This is the kind of thing we're going to build our Department of Homeland Security around...

...That hardly meant he acted alone...

...Between now and the August recess, the Democratic party will have to come clean on its stance toward religion in the public square...

...I look forward to working with President Bush to get this proposal signed into law...

...CCR, a non-profit legal group committed to the "creative use of law as a positive force for social change," has now established the Isabel and Alger Hiss Internship Program, honoring the man who famously made creative use of spying for social change...

...The new Hiss interns will assist CCR attorneys "working on government misconduct cases," since, as the Center's press release informs us, Alger Hiss, Stalin's man in Washington, was the victim of "one of the more infamous cases of governmental misconduct in the 20th century...

...That in mid-February, another group of agents on Cheney's detail left the agents' printed plan for the vice president's trip to the Winter Olympics on a Salt Lake City store counter—and then abused the shopkeeper who conscientiously returned it to them...

...Either way, they were wrong and should have known better...

...There's even—predictably, THE Scrapbook supposes—a Clinton angle...

...Scrapbook Secrets of the Secret Service Capitol Hill lawmakers considering the president's plan for a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security will want to look awfully hard at one particular flow-chart revision it con-templates—the new outfit's absorption of the Secret Service—in light of an eye-opening report in the June 17 issue of U.S...

...And that morale problems—and resulting early retirements and resignations—have become so severe that the agency is having trouble staffing the sniper teams that patrol the White House roof...

...Either they were being politically correct to an egregious extent or they were just plain winging it...

...it is a bipartisan proposal that strikes the right balance between harnessing the best forces of faith in our public life without infringing on the first amendment...

...But at El Al on Independence Day...

...The CARE Act provides tax relief to charities, both secular and religious, and is designed to level the playing field for faith-based organizations that apply for federal grants...

...He wrote in an op-ed that "the CARE Act isn't a Republican or Democratic plan...

...Please...

...It was coauthored by Senator Joseph Lieberman and counts Hillary Clinton among its cosponsors...

...News says that Merletti's successor, current Secret Service director Brian Stafford, is also "widely believed" to have had an adulterous fling with a Clinton staffer...

...What we're facing here is not simply a refusal to face facts but also a ludicrous desire to avoid anything that resembles "ethnic profiling," even when a terrorist act has been carried out...

...That a few months ago, four agents on Vice President Cheney's personal detail got into a drunken brawl with a large group of San Diego bar patrons—during which one agent bit off the tip of a local's ear...

...Has the FBI really gotten serious about the war on terrorism...

...Huh...

...The media picked up and promoted both points...

...Schmeltzer is right about one thing: Her boss controls the Senate schedule...