Global

An interesting semi-historical footnote concerning Dick Cheney's oft-reiterated references to President Clinton's weaseling under oath. "He knows what the meaning of 'is' is," says Cheney in his campaign stump speech to show the moral superiority of the Republican camp.

Which leads us to this story about Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager and the man they call "Bush's brain."

Rove, as all the world knows, has been a Republican political operative in Texas for 23 years. During that time, Texas Democrats noticed a pattern that they eventually became somewhat paranoid about: In election years, there always seemed to be an FBI investigation of some sitting Democrat either announced or leaked to the press.

After the election was over, the allegations often vanished, although in the case of Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower, three of his aides were later convicted. The investigations were conducted by FBI agent Greg Rampton, who was stationed in Austin in those years.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Gosh, the most balloons EVER! I bet all you slackers out there who weren't watching are sorry now.

Just a few hints to Gov. George W. Bush's speechwriter: When you go into the riff about "I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect," try putting it more than two paragraphs away from your last attempt to stick a shiv in the Democrats.

If it had come just a few grafs later, we might already have forgotten the seven paragraphs of jabs at Al Gore, including the one that worked, "He now leads the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but the only thing he has to offer is fear itself."

See? Just a little more separation, and you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can trash the D's and still call for "civility and respect" without being accused of hypocrisy.

Item Two: For eight years, the R's have been attacking Bill Clinton with a focus that often bordered on the maniacal. It is simply an obsession. And it has never worked.

Now, it's the turn of Al Gore and Joe Lieberman to be flattered by the same moist-eyed press corps that's been hailing the stultifying Republican convention in Philadelphia as a masterpiece of political stagecraft. Gore is being congratulated for pre-empting popular anger at the moral turpitude of the Clinton years. Yes, this is the same press that told us for an entire year that the American people were so furious at Bill Clinton for his conduct toward Monica Lewinsky that they wanted him to step down. Of course, poll after poll showed the American people rallying to Bill Clinton's side.

I write on the morning after the announcement of Gore's pick. Mostly, it's a day of shame for journalism. Column upon column of newsprint hails Gore's acumen in undercutting the supposed "moral edge" in public esteem now held by the Republicans. Beyond anecdotal assessment, no evidence for this edge is advanced. Column upon column dwells upon Lieberman's powers of ethical discrimination, symbolized by his observance of the Sabbath and his criticisms of Bill Clinton.

AUSTIN, Texas -- My favorite factoid gathered by the 15,000 underutilized reporters in Philadelphia is that the opening gavel of the Republican National Convention was "acoustically enhanced" by a sound engineer to sound "better than real." Yup.

I loved the blind mountain-climber giving the Pledge of Allegiance. (Hint to Dems: In South Texas, we have twin dwarfs with 12 fingers apiece who play the accordion.) Of course, everybody noticed that there were more black faces on the stage than in the audience, but that's nothing.

At the 1972 Republican convention, there was an Ethnic Night party at which I saw John Volpe, the Italian-American secretary of transportation, doing the frug while a Chinese girl sang "Never on Sunday" in Yiddish. Is this a great country or what? Except the Republicans have proved yet again the tragic truth that White People Can't Clap On Beat. Or is it just Republicans?

By the way, one quarter of the Republican delegates are millionaires, and fewer than 10 percent of them make less than $50,000 a year.

It's "Reach Out" time. It happens every four years. Someone gets up in front of the Republicans and reminds the white people filling 95 percent of the convention hall that the party has to reach out. Who better than Colin Powell? He told the delegates in Philadelphia that it was time to "reach out to minority communities and particularly the African-American community." Then, he issued a warning: "The world is watching to see if all this power and wealth is just for the well-to-do, the comfortable, the privileged."

Someone should give Gen. Powell the news. The facts are in. Power and wealth in America are most definitely reserved for the privileged. At the level of substantive policy, both the Democrats and the Republicans are in cordial agreement on this point, with their only disagreement being how many padlocks to set on the door to keep the unprivileged out.

PHILADELPHIA -- Every day at noon, a couple of blocks from the convention complex where GOP delegates held their caucuses, destitute men lined up for lunch on the sidewalk in front of the Ministry to the Homeless. It was not a photo op.

More than a few journalists were visiting Philadelphia -- in fact, about 15,000 of them arrived to cover the Republican National Convention. But midway through the week, an aide at the Ministry to the Homeless told me, not a single reporter had dropped by to inquire about the bedraggled spectacle.

"We feed homeless guys," the staff member said. "Yesterday, we fed 223." At least three-quarters of them, he estimated, were living on the streets in the City of Brotherly Love.

Is this kind of situation unusual for an American city? He shook his head. "There's homelessness wherever you go."

That night, I overheard a few delegates discussing news coverage of the convention. About the only negative theme emerging, they agreed, was that the event had been carefully staged. "If the criticism is that it's scripted," said one, "well, God bless it."

What are the economic costs for American society of the vast expansion of our prison-industrial complex? According to criminal justice researcher David Barlow at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, between 1980 and 2000, the combined expenditures of federal, state and local governments on police have increased about 400 percent. Corrections expenditures for building new prisons, upgrading existing facilities, hiring more guards, and related costs, increased approximately one thousand percent. Although it currently costs about $70,000 to construct a typical prison cell, and about $25,000 annually to supervise and maintain each prisoner, the U.S. is currently building 1,725 new prison beds per week.

The driving ideological and cultural force that rationalized and justifies mass incarceration is the white American public’s stereotypical perceptions about race and crime. As Andrew Hacker perceptively noted in 1995, “Quite clearly, ‘black crime’ does not make people think about tax evasion or embezzling from brokerage firms. Rather, the offenses generally associated with blacks are those . . .

There are today over two million Americans incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails throughout the United States. More than one-half, or one million, are black men and women. The devastating human costs of the mass incarceration of one out of every thirty-five individuals within black America are beyond imagination. While civil rights organizations like the NAACP and black institutions such as churches and mosques have begun to address this widespread crisis of black mass imprisonment, they have frankly not given it the centrality and importance it deserves.

Black leadership throughout this country should place this issue at the forefront of their agendas. And we also need to understand how and why American society reached this point of constructing a vast prison industrial complex, in order to find strategies to dismantle it.

AUSTIN, Texas -- For those of us trying to get our slacker fellow citizens to pay attention to this absorbing presidential race, life is looking up a little.

Gov. George W. Bush was complaining last week about attacks by Democrats -- he frequently does that -- and then he added, in his sunny, positive way:

"Secretary Cheney brought people together and helped win a war, which stands in contrast to Vice President Al Gore, who tends to divide people, to create war."

I like this pattern. Bush used it quite successfully against John McCain in the primaries, time and again. Bush would say something tacky about McCain, who would then say something tacky about Bush; then Bush would loudly protest that he was being attacked. "This is nothing but attack politics, and aren't we all tired of attack politics?"

He had a whole ad campaign complaining that McCain had compared him to Bill Clinton. Then he'd say something else tacky about McCain.

If you’re trying to make sense out of recent Dispatch reporting on racial profiling by the Columbus Police Department (CPD), forget it. The Dispatch coverage suggests that since 28% of the traffic tickets issued in 1999 were given to African American drivers in Columbus and the city’s black population is 25%, there obviously isn’t any racial profiling.

James Moss, President of the Police Officers for Equal Rights (POER), the organization that spearheaded the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation of the Columbus Police, has a different take than the daily monopoly.

Moss, who holds a master’s degree, points out the obvious shortcomings in the Dispatch analysis. By uncritically reporting the statistical data supplied by Deputy Chief Rockwell of the Columbus Police, the paper bought the assumption that African Americans in Columbus are licensed drivers and use cars for transportation at the same rate as the white population. Labor statistics indicate that the black population is disproportionately younger, unemployed/underemployed and out of the labor market. They’re also disproportionately COTA bus users and far less likely to own or drive a car.