Op-Ed

AUSTIN, Texas -- A hearty round of congratulations to all concerned in this year's presidential race for three weeks of politics at their finest.

First, we had the great debate over whether the vice president smooched his wife for too long at the Democratic National Convention -- a matter of burning moment to the republic -- complete with exegesis of the smacker as to whether or not he frenched her. Comparison of the candidates' economic plans was shelved for that week.

Then we had the Debate on Debates, a subject gripping the nation and affecting the very lives of all who dwell herein, with the referees in solid concert that W. Bush's ploy to make Al Gore look slippery was too cute by half and only succeeded in underlining Bush's gutlessness. Consideration of global warming was postponed.

Next we had a reprise of that old favorite, the Open Mike Gotcha, with Bush calling a New York Times reporter a major-league casserole. Although it can be argued that Bush's failure to apologize was major-league tacky, the matter necessitated shelving all questions related to economic globalization.

AUSTIN, Texas -- When I was in my 20s, the subject of insurance was so vastly boring that it was a way to describe a bad date: "like talking to an insurance salesman." It's still sort of like your teeth -- something you'd rather not think about but have to take care of -- so let's plunge in.

As Jonathan Cohn pointed out in the May 1 New Republic, the object of health insurance is to get as many people as possible into one big pool, mixing the sick with the healthy. This way, the healthy pay a little more than they otherwise would, but those who get sick pay a lot less.

Since everyone gets sick eventually, if only from old age, it works out fairly. Your chances of never being sick a day in your life and then dropping dead of an undiagnosed heart condition at an early age are less-than-lottery-slim.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The "case" against Wen Ho Lee of the Los Alamos Laboratory is disgraceful. The man was held for nine months over a "case" that never even rose to the level of contempt. And by and large, the media have been culpable as well.

One need know very little about nuclear weapons to realize that the likelihood of Lee's having given away the "crown jewels" of our nuclear secrets was extremely remote, starting with the fact that the W-88 technology is more than 20 years old. Science just doesn't work like that. I suppose this is another indication of how short the American media are in trained science writers.

Nor was it difficult to discern from the beginning that the case, qua case, was quite rank. Wen Ho Lee was busted and smeared all over the front pages for something that we knew almost immediately was not that unusual, and we knew that the same thing had been done by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who was not accused of treason.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Let's all take a long step back and then look at this again: Is the human race just another species in the long history of Earth that's too dumb to adapt and survive?

We clever upright primates have so far outstripped everyone save the cockroaches, but we seem to be forgetting what knocked off so many of the other major species: climate change. And if we're not smart enough to learn from that, it's our turn to go extinct.

Nothing like a couple of days of 110-degree heat to remind us that global warming has nothing to do with the end of the Cold War. According to the fossilologists, the Big Ones, like the Ice Age, may have had a proximate cause -- meteor hit, giant volcano eruption blotted out sun ... something happened. But in your relatively short tens of thousands of years, all you get is a more or less cyclical back-and-forth. Now coral reefs in the Pacific that are a thousand years old are dying. This is not cyclical.

After many months of controversy over her anti-gay statements to millions of radio listeners, Dr. Laura ascended the airwaves to an even higher and mightier pulpit. Her crusade has reached televisionland.

Over the summer, Schlessinger held onto the misconceptions that led her to describe homosexuality as "a biological error" manifested by "deviants." Meanwhile, she tried some damage control -- but couldn't let go of her bigotry.

In a July interview with Time magazine, she insisted: "Not being able to relate normally to a member of the opposite sex is some kind of error. I do not see that as insulting at all. It is a statement of biological fact."

Actually, it's nothing of the kind. Dr. Laura is about as scientific as William Jennings Bryan was at the Scopes trial, thumping the Bible as a backbeat for old prejudices. Fortunately, these days, most clergy are far more enlightened.

AUSTIN, Texas -- OK, let's try this again verrrrry slowly, class -- like Al Gore in his Mr. Rogers mode.

George W. Bush on education, supposedly his strong point, is making no sense. He is getting it all wrong and is dumbing down what could have been a really useful debate on how to fix the public schools.

For political reasons, he needs to claim that his little nostrums have more to do with the improvement in Texas public schools than the fundamental reforms made long before he showed up.

This is depressing and dangerous, and could well lead to our once again falling for some cute little quick-fix slogan (higher standards, end social promotion, vouchers, accountability, back to basics, phonics, school choice), while ignoring the real basics (smaller class sizes, more preschool programs, spending more on poor kids and better classroom equipment -- not to mention fixing the roofs and the windows).

When I took Texas history in public school, we weren't taught one single thing about the labor movement in this state -- but we did learn the name of the horse that Sam Houston rode at the Battle of San Jacinto, which happened to be Saracen.

So you may not have heard of the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, the largest and most important clash between management and organized labor in 19th-century Texas history.

In Bruceville, 16 miles south of Waco, is a monument to Martin Irons, who led the Great Strike. Even allowing for the florid sentimentality of 19th-century orators, Irons seems to have been an uncommonly good man, gentle and warm, and a natural leader.

He was born in Scotland in 1827 and immigrated to the United States at the age of 14. He worked as a machinist for the railroads all over the Southwest; he was a member of the machinists union and the Knights of Pythias. He was also interested in the Grange, the populist farmers movement.

I've just read a stunning new report titled "Off the Record: What Media Corporations Don't Tell You About Their Legislative Agendas." Unfortunately, the information in it will not be coming to a television set near you.

In the hours after release of the report, the big cable TV networks were devoting lots of live coverage to breathless stories about tragic deaths that occurred years ago. Yet again, mighty news operations focused on JonBenet Ramsey and Princess Diana. And none of the outlets were more transfixed with those stories than CNN -- owned by Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate.

As it happens, Time Warner figures prominently in "Off the Record," a carefully researched document from the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity. "No media corporation lavishes more money on lobbyists or political campaigns than Time Warner," the report explains. "The media giant spent nearly $4.1 million for lobbying last year, and since 1993 has contributed $4.6 million to congressional and presidential candidates and the two political parties."

AUSTIN, Texas -- The people of Texas should be gearing up to pitch a fit come January.

They want us to pay for more prisons. MORE prisons. We just finished the biggest prison-spending spree in history. Starting in 1991, we spent billions to more than double the number of beds in the system. They promised us that we wouldn't have to build another prison for at least a generation. And now they want more.

And there's one other point. This. Is. Not. Working.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that Texas has more of its people imprisoned than any other state -- 163,190. That's more than California, which has 13 million more people than Texas does.

The study, released this week by the Justice Policy Institute, not only finds Texas with the highest incarceration rate in the country -- it also finds the incarceration rate among young African-American men 63 percent higher than the national average. Nearly one out of three young black men is under some form of criminal justice control in Texas.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas Health Commissioner Reyn Archer. Ooops.

Maybe we should just make that a standing headline. As you know, Archer, Gov. W. Bush's pick for the job, has this tendency to put his foot in it. He's often disastrously frank, which is sort of endearing.

Last time he got into trouble was for saying Texas has a high teen-age pregnancy rate because the state's Hispanic population does not believe that "getting pregnant is a bad thing."

The Alan Guttmacher Institute says that Texas Hispanics have a higher pregnancy rate than Anglos or blacks, but that the white rate is among the highest in the nation, too.

All this upset the Mexican-American community.