A heated debate is shaping up over Judge Charles Pickering, President Bush's choice to fill a vacancy on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Pickering's critics have implied that he is a racist. His supporters have responded that he has warm relations with blacks in his hometown, Laurel, Miss., and that he is being smeared for ideological reasons. We believe that Mr. Pickering bears no animus toward blacks and that charges of racism have no place in this debate. But based on the serious questions raised about his record as a judge, we urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote down his nomination.
Bush-bashing alive in Democrat stronghold
"There must be something in the home cooking Barbara was whipping up. Because George and Jeb seem to be following the same recipe: fiscal mismanagement, broken promises, allegiance to special interests and neglect of the people's interest," McAuliffe told Democrats at Broward's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fundraiser.
Campaign Contributors Go for Gold
While Holding may be the poster child for how to turn the Olympic games to personal gain, he is hardly the only campaign contributor to benefit. After Salt Lake City won the contract for the Winter Olympics, the Utah congressional delegation lobbied Washington hard for massive amounts of public funding to help pay for roads, buses, parking lots, sewers, tree planting, and so on -- much of the costs for putting on the games. They were hugely successful. The price tag for taxpayers for the 2002 Olympics is some $1.5 billion, according to a special report in Sports Illustrated by award-winning investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele. That's one-and-a-half-times more than the amount spent by the government on all seven Olympics games in the U.S. since 1904, combined, even after adjusting for inflation. And private beneficiaries reap much of the benefit from increased tourism and Olympic contracts.
This week the vice president emerged blinking from his capital cave into the bright California sunshine and went on Jay Leno's show to explain once again why it is none of the public's business how he arrived at the energy policy that is about to be taken up by the Senate. He is not just protecting the shy moguls -- who require a pledge of confidentiality, without which they would not open their mouths in his office. Cheney is protecting the presidency itself. It will be weakened if ordinary citizens are allowed to know how come the country has an energy policy that sounds as if it were written in the executive suite of Enron.
The General Accounting Office is taking him to court to find out who was in the room when such matters as drilling in Alaska and subsidizing dirty fuels were decided. The Sierra Club -- pesky environmentalists that they are -- has already filed a lawsuit aimed at finding out not just who was there but what was said.
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