Tilting at Windmills

Sins Of Commission * Gubernatorial Lotharios * Drinking with DeLay The Lobbyist's Loss Leader * Right-Sizing and Wrong-Sizing

IT USED TO BE THAT THE JUSTIfication for major college football's corrupting effect on academia was that football was a cash cow that helped subsidize education. But now that appears to be an increasingly dubious proposition. The reason is an escalation of salaries caused by a bidding war for college coaches. In this connection, it's important to remember that some schools have up to 18 assistant coaches per team, all of whom are commanding higher and higher pay. Some schools--Baylor is one--are now taking a slice of their academic budget to pay for football. Doesn't that mean that in such cases there is no longer any justification for the farce football has made of academic standards?

IN HIS NEW BOOK, After, Steven Brill paints a picture of Tom DeLay at work that confirms the worst suspicions in the minds of liberal Democrats:

"At about 2 a.m. the airline lobbyists were still pouring drinks for Tom DeLay at the Majority Whip's office at the Capitol. They had stayed since Thursday night to make sure the congressional staff didn't screw up anything in the rewrite of the airline bailout bill ... [with one exception] everyone else in the Majority Whip's office, including two staffers from the Air Transport Association and one lobbyist for United Airlines, were direct or indirect contributors to Tom DeLay."

INCREDIBLY, THE CIA DIRECtor--who most people think is in charge of the national intelligence community--doesn't even have a voice in determining the budget of the Pentagon's intelligence agencies. As a result, when he recently tried to get the Defense Intelligence Agency to cooperate with the CIA, the head of the DIA, according to Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough of The Washington Times, said, "Don Rumsfeld is my boss, not Mr. Tenet"

I HAD BEEN IMPRESSED BY THE job the Transportation Security Agency did in hiring screeners. Indeed, it seemed to have been done with efficiency and dispatch, with the target of just over 40,000 reached before the congressionally imposed deadline and ultimately a total of 55,000 brought on board. Now comes the news that background investigations into at least 40 percent of the new employees are still not finished. "Dozens" have criminal records, according to both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, several for the "unlawful use, distribution or manufacture of explosives or weapons." Add to this unsettling news word that the TSA is eliminating 6,000 of the screeners' jobs by Sept. 30. A PR genius at the agency has come up with the term "right-sizing" to describe this process. But if you consider for a moment, that seems to imply that the TSA's previous estimates of the number of employees needed amounted to "wrong-sizing." Even more troubling is the possibility that the agency's decision is not based on real security need, but is in fact another consequence of the loss of revenue due to the Bush tax cuts. Indeed the TSA's own press release concedes as much when it describes the "right-sizing" as "driven in part by budgetary constraints."

SPEAKING OF THE IMPACT OF tax cuts, Tom Friedman of The New York Times--who incidentally, to our delight, has pronounced himself a neoliberal--has come up with a great idea: Democrats should point out that every time Bush mentions "tax cuts" he means "service cuts."

Friedman's point is illustrated by a recent article in The Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey about the Shenandoah National Park: "Budget constraints have been shrinking what visitors can find at the park." Indeed, what is needed is not less money, but more funds for park operations--money to better monitor air pollution that is "stunting forest growth and pocking leaves with black spots," to catch poachers who are slaughtering the park's black bears, to eradicate invasive pests that are decimating the park's hemlock trees, and to study and control the effects of acid rain, which is killing young black trout. The magnificent views from the park's Skyline Drive are among my most cherished memories--as a child, I thought they were a glimpse of paradise. Now they are usually obscured by a brown haze of pollution.

IS THERE SOMETHING IN THE water in Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia? They have long been known for their less-than-admirable addiction to political hanky-panky. Now it appears that another form of naughtiness is common to them as well. We all know about Arkansas' Bill Clinton. More recently caught in adulterous relationships were Kentucky's Governor Paul Patton and West Virginia's Governor Bob Wise. State employees tend to be the favorite target of these gubernatorial Lotharios. Patron's girlfriend is a member of the state lottery commission, and Wises an employee of the state's development office. Gennifer Flowers says she got her state job only after she had come across. It is not clear whether Patton and Wise similarly insisted on an advance deposit.