Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Wasn't Fine One of the Three Stooges?

Friday, May 19, 2000

I know I swore I was finished with the Elian Gonzales story, but I drove to Maryland's Eastern Shore last weekend and went past the Wye River estate where Elian is being re-introduced to the rigors of life in Cuba when he's not being introduced to the rigors of life in Georgetown.

Next door to the property where Elian, his Father, and about half the first graders in the Cuban public school system are staying, is farmland which is being - surprise - developed. There is a sign which says, more or less, "$0 Down, Possibly no Move-In Costs." I thought, hmmm, just like Cuba.

A couple of miles up U.S. Route 50 is a huge outlet mall. Women's clothes, men's clothes, house wares, sneakers, bookstores, luggage stores, you name it; they've got it on sale. I thought, hmmmmm, nothing like THAT in Cuba.

Here's the latest defense of the mounting number of polls which show Al "It's-Really-Really-Early" Gore trailing George W. Bush in every conceivable dimension: "He's doing fine." That's the political professionals' code for, "Get paid in advance. This campaign is toast."

Maybe the Clinton Administration is correct on Microsoft: A public radio report focused on some public high schools in Pennsylvania which are providing - in addition to the regular curriculum - special courses in Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel for those students who are planning to go right into the workforce, rather than college.

One young woman who became certified in Excel, said that she got a raise from her after school job after she passed the course. If that doesn't prove why Microsoft should be broken up � Heyyyyyy. Wait a minute! Students are getting raises for learning how to use Microsoft products? Isn't there something illegal about this?

A report on National Public Radio yesterday said that Yasser Arafat's decision to hire a Washington lobbyist is "a sign the Palestinian Authority is moving swiftly toward statehood."

The notion of having a lobbyist as a sign of national maturity is, at a minimum, interesting.

AP Headline: "World Bank loans $232 million to Iran." The next time those demonstrators come to Washington to complain about the World Bank? I'm joining them.

Lame Duck Watch: Only NBC and Fox have agreed to carry Bill Clinton's five minute address on the China trade vote scheduled for next week. CBS and ABC have apparently decided to stick with their regular programming. ABC doesn't want to interrupt its 37th episode of "Millionaire" - of the week. CBS can't possibly break away for five minutes from a made-for-TV movie of how Paul and Linda McCartney met. True.

Campaign Issues I; Education: From the Dallas Morning News' report on the results of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test (TAAS) a statewide achievement tests given to all students: "Passing rate on TAAS hits 80% for first time: Improvements seen at nearly every grade level." And, the DMN goes on to report, "Black students had the biggest gains of any ethnic group. For example, 74 percent of black fifth-graders passed - up 6 percentage points from a year ago."

Campaign Issues II; Fund Raising Scandals: To the surprise of absolutely no one in the Western world, a memo on the Clinton/Gore-Chinese fundraising connection in the 1996 campaign has surfaced. The memo, written by FBI Director Louis Freeh almost four years ago, suggested that the chief of the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, Lee Radek was "under a lot of pressure not to go forward with the investigation" because Attorney General Janet Reno's job "might hang in the balance."

Apropos fund raising scandals, a reader sent along the following clip from the Christian Science Monitor on the race between Bush and Gore: "In Minnesota, where the two contestants are � even in the polls, Clinton's ethical residue is sticking on Gore. Or as Carleton's Professor Schier puts it: 'Gore is the bathtub ring of the Clinton administration.'"

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