Global

The sky is black with cows coming home to roost. In Germany, it's probably the biggest crisis since 1945. Millions of Germans daren't sausage. In France, ranchers and slaughterhouse workers are blocking all roads to Paris, and traffic is backed up 100 kilometers. The reason is mad cow. Last week, the Health Minister for Germany's largest state, Baerbel Hoehn in North-Rhine-Westphalia, told the Cologne Express: ''Whoever wants to be totally certain shouldn't eat beef at the moment.'' Bavaria, where the second mad cow case was confirmed in mid-December, pledges to spend $9.1 million to research how to combat the disease.

In France, there were 18 cases of mad cow disease in the first three months of last year compared with 30 in all of 1999. Cow intestines, traditionally used to make sausages and other charcuterie, have been banned, owing to bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) fears. In October, BSE-infected meat reached three major hypermarket chains, sparking a 40 percent fall in consumption. In November, beef ribs were outlawed, unless cut differently.

A surreal mixup disrupted CNN programming for a few moments on Jan. 17 when the network switched to live coverage of Colin Powell. While the retired general appeared on the screen, the audio was the voice of Sen. Edward Kennedy at another Senate hearing -- as the senior senator from Massachusetts railed against John Ashcroft's record of opposing civil rights.

Suddenly, a rattled CNN anchor was apologizing for the technical difficulty. And viewers were left to ponder the unintended juxtaposition of media images.

We're told that the new administration has embraced the concept of diversity based on merit, with a prime example being the choice of Powell as secretary of state. But the most important domestic policy job is attorney general. And the Ashcroft nomination has sparked a firestorm of resistance for many reasons, including his racial history.

Testifying, Ashcroft did not lack for requisite sound bites: "I believe that racism is wrong... I deplore racism and I always will." His wording was always careful. At one point he said, "I condemn those things that are condemnable."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Worst idea of 2001 so far: naming a newspaper columnist to the U.S. Cabinet. You really don't want columnists running the government. As any newspaper reporter can tell you, all newspaper columnists work maybe two hours a day and spend the rest of their time drinking martinis and misbehaving.

In addition to this deplorable professional life, Linda Chavez brings some truly unwelcome baggage to the position of labor secretary.

What is it about people who are drawn to one political extreme and then flip to the other? Chavez started out as a member of the Young People's Socialist League and now is on the conservative extreme of the Republican Party. You notice that many of the neo-conservatives have similar backgrounds -- there seems to be some personality affinity for true believership.

In the Bible, Job says he wishes that his enemy had written a book. A newspaper column works just as well.

As one of Chavez's admirers put it, "She embodies the term 'movement conservative.'" That's another way of saying "self-righteous zealot."

AUSTIN, Texas -- George W. Bush is threatening to give us an energy policy that marches militantly in exactly the wrong direction.

Bush's views on energy are still those of a West Texas oilman. He once ran for Congress from Midland because he thought Jimmy Carter was leading us toward "European-style socialism.'' What oilmen want for energy policy is Drill More.

At one point during a debate with Al Gore, Bush suggested we encourage drilling in Mexico to lessen our dependence on "foreign'' oil. Startled the Mexicans.

In addition to Bush, who took three oil companies into financial trouble, the new administration boasts Dick Cheney, CEO of Halliburton; Commerce Secretary Don Evans, chairman of Tom Brown oil; and Condoleezza Rice, a director of Chevron. Two of Bush's biggest donors are Ken Lay of Enron and energy player Sam Wyly, who put up the money for the phony ad praising Bush's environmental record.

We've come a long way in this country since the 19th century -- but not so long that an admirer of the Confederacy can't be nominated to run the Justice Department of the United States. The president of the Confederate government, Jefferson Davis, is a hero to Sen. John Ashcroft, the man selected to become the next attorney general.

Ashcroft told the Southern Partisan quarterly in a 1998 interview: "Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Evidently, Ashcroft can't abide the idea that preservation of slavery was a "perverted agenda."

MARATHON, Texas -- So far out in West Texas, there's only God and country on the radio. Along with endless sky and no cellphones. Drive across the Rio Grande in your pickup for lunch and say, "Oh, good, the War on Drugs is bound to work eventually, because there's only 27 trucks waiting on the other side."

In the odd way that the detachment of distant places seems to reinforce reality, it becomes ever clearer that the Republicans in Washington are in an impossible bind.

President-elect George W. Bush seems to have made the odd choice of governing as if he had a mandate in a country where the hot new bumper sticker is "Re-elect Gore." One watches the Republicans in the Senate seal their own doom -- no power sharing, no committee chairmanships. And what do they think the Democrats are going to do when the D's take power?

It's like writing election law -- if you try to bend it in your favor one time, it will come around and bite you on the behind the next.

Let's finger some false prophets who often escape public ridicule because enough time has elapsed since they made their foolish predictions.

Here's that salesman of the virtues, Bill Bennett, who once co-chaired the Council on Crime in America, and issued a 1996 report titled "The State of Violent Crime in America," containing these ominous words and (entirely inaccurate) predictions: "America is a ticking violent crime bomb. Rates of violent juvenile crime and weapons offenses have been increasing dramatically, and by the year 2000, could spiral out of control."

These were the years when headline-seeking criminologists like John DiIulio of Princeton and Northeastern's James Alan Fox painted lurid scenarios of "superpredators," meaning urban youth of color, swelling Generation Y by as much as 24 percent.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The time has come to bid farewell to President William Jefferson Clinton. Been a lot of wasted time and wasted talent these eight years. The politics of personal destruction. A level of vituperation so intense and so stupid that it shut down the federal government twice.

And through it all came the Unsinkable Clinton, ever bobbing up again cheerfully in a fashion that maddened his enemies.

Years ago, an Arkansas senator told me that Clinton's greatest strength is that he's like one of those round-bottomed children's toys -- you tump him over and he pops back up, you tump him over again and he pops back up again. As near as I can tell after eight years, the man gets up every single day in a state of cheerful anticipation, ready to set about whatever's on the plate.

We have never once seen him in a temper or a sulk or being vindictive or holding a grudge. Closest we ever saw to an upset Bill Clinton was right after we had watched him discussing the most intimate details of his private life for four hours on national television, and to this good day I have no idea what public purpose was served by that exercise in humiliation.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Traditionally, when one bids adieu to the year just past, a tone of cynical good-riddance to 12 sorry months is da rigor, as they say in Lubbock.

Well, forget tradition. I say 2000 was a glorious political year from start to finish and can think of few years more packed with delight than the one we have just skinned through. Here's to Y2K, arguably the beginning of the new millennium and inarguably a mighty fine start on something, whatever it was.

Here's to the National Egg On Your Face, How Wrong Can You Be, How Many Times Can You Be That Wrong, Let's Go On Television and Make Fools of Ourselves Year-Long Pundit Pratfall!

From Who's-John-McCain to who won Florida, the most striking feature of the political year was the evitability of George W. Bush.

All the king's horses, all the king's men and all the Republican money in the country could barely drag the poor guy across the finish line. Special thanks to Jeff Greenfield of CNN for having the common sense to observe at several points, "None of us has any idea what's going to happen now."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Goodness, someone has left some nasty little lumps of coal in our stockings. Fortunately, someone else put in a few nice, shiny toys.

Look at this lousy lump. Just before it left town last week, Congress passed a little horror called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, brought to us courtesy of heavy lobbying by Wall Street banks and investment brokers.

Frank Portnoy, writing in The New York Times, describes the bill thusly: "First, it lifts a long-standing ban on futures trading in individual stocks, thus allowing investors to buy shares through brokers with very little money down. Second, it protects a lucrative business for bankers -- the private financial contracts known as swaps -- from being regulated. ... Investors are affected by swaps because they are ... used by many mutual funds and publicly traded companies."