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The magic numbers are 5-2-7

AUSTIN, Texas -- First there was good news. Let's hear it for the U.S. Senate, a profile in courage. A 57-42 vote on requiring "527s" -- the tax-exempt organizations that secretly raise and spend millions to influence elections -- to actually report who gives them money and how they spend it. Amazing.

Then let's have a big, fat raspberry for the House, which voted AGAINST the measure, 216-206. That's even more amazing, since a majority of the House managed to gut it up and vote for McCain-Feingold last time, and these 527s are MUCH worse than the soft-money problem.

Congratulations to Majority Whip Tom DeLay and the rest of the Republican leadership for allowing this rank corruption to continue. The 527s were discovered by tax experts in '96 and have multiplied like maggots. They're phony front groups that can spend unlimited amounts from anonymous sources.

One notable case was Republicans for Clean Air, which ran attack ads against John McCain and turned out to be the billionaire Wyly brothers of Dallas, friends of George W. Bush. Something billing itself as Shape the Debate has ads attacking Al Gore.

Can 'E-government' bring us point-and-click democracy?

There's a slick new term surfing its way into the mass media. "E-government."

Al Gore has given it a big shove forward with a major campaign speech. "The power of government," he proclaimed, "should not be locked away in Washington, but put at your service -- no further than your keyboard." Gore promised online access to almost every government service by 2003: "Together, we will transform America's collection of ramshackle bureaucracies into an e-government that works for every American."

Many citizens would be glad to see the Internet streamline their dealings with federal agencies. But we're now hearing claims that go way beyond matters of efficiency -- to conflate convenience and democracy. "You should not have to wait in line to communicate with your self-government," Gore said in his June 5 speech, evoking visions of "a new system of e-government."

Too much information

AUSTIN, Texas -- At the mythical Fearmonger's Shoppe ("Serving all your phobia needs") in Lake Wobegon last week, there was a special on ways to prevent your early death from the frightful menace of bad handwriting by doctors. A puzzled pharmacist studies an impenetrable prescription and mutters: "Hmm, hmm, looks like 50 milligrams arsenic ... odd. ... Oh well") and you go home. In eight hours, you're lying in a huge refrigerator and your family is planning the memorial service.

Poor penmanship among doctors is estimated to cause as many as 198,000 deaths a year. I bring this up because my reaction to this wonderful whimsy was, "I bet it's happened." And that brings us to the most useful paranoia in our public life: growing concerns about privacy.

Texas, warts and all

AUSTIN, Texas -- My friend Linda Aaker recently visited Europe and came back talking, as Americans so often do, about the great public transportation in this country, the terrific child-care system in that country and the wonderful public housing in another. "Face it," said Aaker, "the United States is the Texas of the advanced countries."

The Texas. We all know what that means -- crude, backward and having miserable social services.

In this festive election year, our governor has put us once again in the national spotlight, and it's not flattering. Texas, where three white guys out looking for a good time decide to drag a black man to death behind a pickup. Where the retarded and the insane are executed to barbaric yowps from drunken frat boys in Huntsville. Where the guv's response to the dirtiest air in the nation is to politely ask polluters if they will please volunteer to quit polluting instead of making them do it.

Texans do not have full access to the courts

AUSTIN -- Well, isn't that special? The governor has granted a 30-day stay to a man on death row so we can figure out from DNA evidence whether the guy should be on Death Row. He may well be, but it'll be nice to be certain for a change.

It took Bush only 131 executions to find a case where he thought there might be some doubt about the matter. No, I take that back. He did once grant a pardon: He had to. That was the memorable case of Henry Lee Lucas, the serial liar, who confessed to 150 murders before our brighter law-enforcement minds started to wonder if he was telling the truth.

The impeccable Texas criminal justice system -- about which the governor is so certain he has repeatedly said he has never had a shred a doubt about any of the 131 executions on his watch -- managed to convict Lucas of a murder that rather demonstrably occurred while Lucas was in another state entirely. Ooops.

It is particularly entertaining to watch Bush on national television solemnly explaining that those on Texas' Death Row have "full access to the courts."

Campaign forecast: A long hot summer of punditry

Every four years, when summer begins, the national media curtain rises on an overheated stage of presidential politics. Like drama critics clutching their programs, thousands of journalists are keenly alert to the feverish orchestration for the Republican and Democratic conventions later in the season. The political show must go on -- no matter how phony it may be.

This time around, reporters and commentators seem to be straining extra hard to fan the flames of interest in the race for the White House. After all, George W. Bush and Al Gore are among the most boring political leaders in the country. And that's saying something.

George Orwell seems to have anticipated the genre of politics that prevails in the United States today, a half-century after his death: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform, mechanically repeating the familiar phrases...one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy."

Denial is not just a river

Personal note to George W. Bush: Wasn't that a great graduation ceremony last Thursday night? I know you are terribly proud of your daughters, Barbara and Jenna.

You probably remember Kristy Reyna -- she was the only one of the 400 Austin High graduates who was in a wheelchair. Kristy was the young woman with the million-dollar smile -- always reminds me of Magic Johnson's. That smile and the big thumbs up as she rolled across the stage lit up the whole Erwin Center. I think she got a bigger hand than your daughters. It was a lot harder for her. The entire Reyna clan was there, on their feet, cheering madly.

Kristy was born 21 years ago with spina bifida and has been through 10 operations to correct some of the effects of that birth defect. So it took her a little longer to get through school. Her mother is Hope Reyna, single mother of five, who supports her children by working as a housekeeper. (Let's hear it for Big Rudy, who kept up the child support and who was there to see their second-oldest child graduate.)

Wolfe's yap

Someone made the odd, maybe malicious, certainly rash decision to put Tom Wolfe on the right-hand side of the cover of Harper's new 150th anniversary issue, facing Mark Twain, a leonine, earthy, dignified old devil, sitting in alert repose, apparently listening. A man to whose energetic image the white suit is incidental. Over on the right-hand side, Wolfe's white suit is dominant, looking just a shade too big for its shriveled occupant, who gazes nowhere in particular with a smirk of wooden self-satisfaction.

The bizarre juxtaposition of Wolfe with Twain consummates 30 years' inflation of the former's modest talents. To read his breathless prose, shrill with yaps and self-importance, is like having a small dog attack one's leg. Wolfe's anniversary essay is called, "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists. Why No One is Celebrating the Second American Century." As Jan. 1, 2000, arrived, Wolfe asks, "Did a single, solitary savant note that the First American Century had just come to an end and the Second American Century had begun?" To which, of course, the answer is that Americans saw the millennial chronology as mostly hype, hooked loosely to the Christian

Why is Bush so starry-eyed?

AUSTIN, Texas -- We are having one of those brief but glorious moments when our attention is focused on foreign affairs, so let's hare right after the sucker.

Much in the news is the charmingly misleading headline that says, "Bush Proposes Deep Cuts in U.S. Nuclear Arsenal." If true, that would be welcome news indeed, but that ain't what his proposal is about. What George W. Bush actually said was: "To heck with the ABM treaty -- we're going to build Star Wars."

The one Bush proposal with no downside is to "take as many weapons as Possible" (all Bush's proposals have this maddeningly vague lack of detail) off high-alert, hair-trigger status. Let's hear it for Bush on that one.

Unilateral reductions in the number of missiles also sounds like a peace proposal, but it doesn't work out that way. Because he is also proposing to build the infamous Star Wars, the Russians, who now want to cut their nukes, are not going to agree to missile reductions.

Against summer

Here we are, on the edge of yet another one, but I don't particularly care for summer myself. At least as compared with spring and fall. My clock started ticking when the Germans were trying to figure out a cross-channel invasion schedule. I was born in the north of Scotland on what was regarded popularly, though not with complete astronomical precision, as a summer's day, June 6, 1941, three years before D-Day, with my father far away in London where the Luftwaffe's bombs and rockets were falling. My mother had evacuated to the large house of an American friend, just north of Inverness. She felt the pangs come on that Sunday morning, and the doctor arrived with kilt and fishing rod, mightily displeased to be called from his fly-casting.

Down in London and denied access to the north of Scotland because he was a Red, my father went down the street to the shop to get a Sunday paper. Down came one of Hitler's rockets, up went 5, Acacia Road and St. Johns Wood. My father returned to find a lot of rubble and the cat with its fur blown off. The cat thought my father had done it, had a nervous breakdown, and never did forgive. So much for seasonal precedent.

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