The Week.

-- In a recent interview, Vermont senator James Jeffords mentioned that ththe Senate Democrats joined in singing "Consider Yourself (at Home)," from Oliver!, when he joined their caucus. In the musical, didn't that song welcome Oliver into a gang of pickpockets?

-- For $150, Republican donors can get three photographs of highlights ofof President George W. Bush's first year in office. One of those photos shows him, in an airplane, making a phone call on 9/11. "A shameless fund- raising ploy," said Democratic representative Nita Lowey, "politiciz[ing] the tragic events of September 11." Hold on, Nita. Bush was president on September 11; he has directed the war on terror; shouldn't he be able to take credit for its successes? Did President Lincoln in 1864 talk only about the Homestead Act? Come to think of it, Lincoln politicized the Mexican War when he was a congressman (he argued against it, vehemently). Former president Bill Clinton reportedly expressed regret that he did not face this challenge. Should President Bush -- can he -- ignore the fact that it has come to him?

-- Washington is so arranged that tax cuts are a matter of intense dedeliberation while spending goes up on autopilot. Over the last five years, domestic spending has risen by 35 percent. Congress is set to increase it again this year, by another 15 percent -- in which case, as the Wall Street Journal editorializes, "President Bush will have presided over the largest two-year spending boost since the Great Society." Bush has done one large thing to restrain spending: If not for his tax cut, passed last year, no doubt spending would be even higher. But he ought to do something more direct this year: threaten to veto profligate spending bills.

-- As a Ted Kennedy staffer in the 1980s, Gregory B. Craig organized SeSenate hearings whose purpose was to make Nicaragua's anti-Communist rebels look like monsters. As a high-powered Williams & Connolly lawyer in the 1990s, he represented Bill Clinton during impeachment and Elian Gonzalez's father (and thus, one might argue, the Castro regime, which was controlling the father) during that controversy. Now this activist- attorney has a new client: Colin Powell's State Department. State hired him as an outside counsel in a wrongful-discharge case brought by whistleblower Linda Shenwick, a career employee who exposed waste and mismanagement at the U.N. and was promptly dismissed for it by Madeleine Albright. The Department of State may be obligated to defend itself in these proceedings, though its conduct in this case is highly questionable. The decision to hire Craig, however, is simply bizarre -- the sort of thing one would expect from a Gore administration.

-- John Magaw, the head of the Transportation Security Administration, totold Congress that the Bush administration opposes the arming of pilots as an anti-hijacking measure. Pilots, he said, should concentrate on flying the plane rather than fighting terrorists. But he is still considering whether to let pilots have stun guns, which would involve no less distraction. It makes sense to include pilots in an airplane-security strategy. Most of them already have firearms training, and they are already screened for mental health. They could easily be equipped with bullets that would pose no risk of piercing the plane and causing it to lose pressure. Under current policy, the last line of defense is to shoot down hijacked planes. Given this alternative, surely there should be a next-to-the-last defense: letting pilots shoot down the hijackers instead.

-- Just what does Sen. Lieberman hope to accomplish by issuing a susubpoena to the White House for information about its contacts with Enron? In March, Lieberman, who is chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, and a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, asked the White House for the information. The White House pledged to turn it over by the end of May. But Lieberman pushed ahead with a plan to have the committee issue a subpoena on May 22 -- even after the White House promised to send some of the information that very day. Lieberman forced through the subpoena on a party-line vote. Then, as promised, the information arrived from the White House. It showed that there had been more contacts between White House staffers and representatives of Enron than had previously been known, but it did nothing to change the basic fact that the White House played no role in Enron's rise or collapse. Nothing scandalous, in other words. But Lieberman promises to keep digging -- all the way to the election, if need be.

-- To hear Gray Davis and other Democrats tell it, California's rerecent electricity mess is the result of the sinister machinations of Enron. In proof, they have seized on newly released memos in which Enron executives discussed, among themselves, strategies to exploit the profit-making opportunities created by the state's price controls. The colorful names that the Enronites gave these strategies -- such as "Get Shorty," "Death Star," and "Ricochet" -- have lent credence to the Democrats' accusations. Peter VanDoren and Jerry Taylor, energy experts at the Cato Institute, have analyzed these strategies in some detail. Their conclusion: While some of Enron's maneuvers actually increased the supply of electricity when California needed it, they may have been responsible for a small fraction of the price spike the state experienced. But they were not the source of the problem. Prices rose because of a drought that reduced hydroelectricity production, and an unusually hot summer and cold winter that increased demand. And if Enron gamed the state's regulatory scheme, that is in part the fault of the state's politicians, who created a scheme that could be gamed. Not for the first time, a government tried to outsmart the market, only to have the market outsmart it.

-- Try as it might to avoid the issue, the Bush administration is going toto have to deal with racial preferences. In a case involving the University of Michigan, a federal court of appeals has just ruled that law schools may employ preferences to achieve racial diversity. The legal pros and cons are not in fine balance. On the court's side of the argument: one Supreme Court justice's opinion, which no other justice endorsed, in a 1978 case. On the other side: the clear words of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination by universities that receive federal money. The Michigan ruling is in conflict with decisions by other courts of appeals, so the Supreme Court is likely to step in to clarify the law. When it decides to adjudicate the issue, what advice will the Bush administration's lawyers give it? Justice Sandra Day O'Connor may very well look to it for guidance. Conservatives will be watching, too.

-- Everyone hates telemarketers -- probably even the 6 million people whwho work in the field do, when they're at home being bothered. Responding to this popular sentiment, the Federal Trade Commission has proposed establishing a national "do not call" list: Sign up, and it would be illegal for the telemarketers to call you. It's a tempting idea, but before endorsing federal action we should ask a few questions. Are there alternatives to federal action? Yes. Individuals annoyed by unwanted calls can screen calls using either caller ID or answering machines; they can buy cheap devices that block electronically generated calls; or, in some states, they can sign up with state "do not call" lists. Is there constitutional warrant for federal action here? It's hard to see how cutting down on minor annoyances falls among the delegated responsibilities of the federal government. Telemarketers should show some restraint, but so should the FTC.

-- President Bush's trip to Europe took place amid growing European susurliness about our power, and American surliness about that surliness. Among conservatives, sentiment appears to be growing for going our separate ways. But this is not a sensible option, as it would encourage the development of a rival superpower. This magazine has long argued that a pan-European state would be contrary to American interests, both because of the logic of its position as a competitor and because of its dirigiste ideological tendencies. Now EU official Chris Patten has as much as said that resentment of American power will serve as the sentimental basis of the European project. Similar statements by other European leaders are not hard to find. The rise of Le Pen-style nationalism is another vindication of our analysis: European integration was supposed to be the antidote to such outbreaks, but it has instead turned out to be their cause. The logical conclusion from this analysis is not that America should seethe at Europe from the sidelines, which would only spur the Euro-nationalists; still less is it that America should continue to express support for European integration, as Bush did in Berlin on this trip. It is rather that we should engage Europe more vigorously: encouraging European nations to make a larger military contribution to NATO and to abandon a European defense force, in return for our taking their military views more seriously; working toward a transatlantic free-trade zone including pro- American regimes on Europe's periphery (especially Turkey and perhaps Russia); and, in general, siding with those Europeans who favor a larger, freer, more open and Atlanticist Europe. That would be good for America, for global stability -- and for ordinary Europeans themselves, who, let's not forget, have shown much less enthusiasm for a European superstate than their rulers have.

-- At least in Colombia, the political elite has finally learned the lelessons of pursuing a "peace process" with thugs and murderers. In 1998, Colombian president Andres Pastrana handed over a chunk of the country the size of Switzerland to FARC on the theory that such a gesture would win goodwill and warm feelings from the communist rebels. Instead: more hijackings, kidnappings, and murder -- all funded by drug trafficking. Colombia has now broken with this make-nice approach, electing Alvaro Uribe Velez president on a platform of smashing the rebels. It is another good sign that the Bush administration is abandoning the absurd idea that U.S. assistance to Colombia should be used only against drug cultivation and trafficking and not against the rebels themselves. Uribe deserves the civilized world's best wishes and, if he succeeds in vanquishing FARC, a Nobel Peace Prize.

-- The graying American president offered trade with Cuba in return for popolitical and economic reforms. Jimmy Carter on his recent trip? No, George W. Bush in a speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of Cuban independence. Bush lifted restrictions on humanitarian assistance and offered scholarships for Cuban students. He offered normalization if the Cuban government held free, internationally monitored parliamentary elections in 2003, and loosened the straitjacket on the economy (e.g., by permitting Cubans to form independent trade unions, to keep hard-currency wages paid by foreign employers, and to use Cuban hotels now marked Solamente Turistas). Bush promised that America would respond to "step by step" improvements. He also told the truth: Castro is "a tyrant who uses brutal methods to enforce a bankrupt vision." Castro will never relax his grip without powerful inducements. Will liberals and Europeans ever relax their grip on the notion that Castro is a beloved populist who does not have to make any reforms?

-- You never know when Castroite propaganda will hit you -- you could bebe at the ballet. The American Ballet Theater is now in residence at the Metropolitan Opera House, and its star attraction is Carlos Acosta, a Cuban-born dancer. An article in ABT's program informs, "Cuba enjoys a great ballet tradition, which Fidel Castro fully supports. Consequently, any Cuban child can attend the state-supported ballet schools and receive good instruction." Thing is, schools in Communist countries tend to be state-supported -- that's sort of the point of Communism. Cuba has always been a dance-loving society, but Castro abolished the private dance academies when he seized power. Does Castro use the ballet and other arts for propagandistic purposes? Of course. Dictators usually do. Hitler and Stalin did. One could easily have written, "Russia enjoys a great ballet tradition, which Joseph Stalin fully supports. Consequently, any Russian child can attend the state-supported ballet schools and receive good instruction." The tendency of free people to puff up or perfume the dictator in Havana is one of the great scandals and mysteries of our times.

-- Like their American sisters in arms, British women in the military flfly combat aircraft and serve on warships and in combat-support positions. Following a two-year study, however, British defense secretary Geoff Hoon has announced that he will not risk combat effectiveness by opening military units that "close with the enemy" to women. But the employment minister, Margaret Hodge, continues to agitate for combat integration, in the hope that women will also "take their share of the disabled." Actually, female combatants would take far more than their share of casualties. The study found that most women showed a lesser capacity for aggression and failed to perform as well as men on key physical tests -- by a lot. Only 0.1 percent of female applicants, and 1 percent of trained female soldiers, were able to meet the standards for direct combat roles. Why is New Labour suddenly showing more interest in combat effectiveness than equal opportunity? Perhaps because some Labour ministers have now seen the face of battle in trouble spots like Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. War does tend to concentrate the mind.

-- CBS's airing of the Daniel Pearl ritual-murder video caused great agagony in the country. There were many arguments, for and against. It was said that the terrorists' video was a kind of pornography, degrading and sensationalistic. It was said that the broadcast would inspire similar taped ritual murders, as terrorists realized that they could get American air-time. It was noted that other networks had refused to run the tape. And it was noted that the Pearl family violently objected. All true, and all important. And yet the tape served to remind Americans of the nature of the enemy we face. It has been a long time since September 11, and those initial pictures. Memories fade; war fever subsides. When Maureen Dowd in the New York Times writes, or quotes President Bush as saying, "evildoers," she does so with a snicker -- and yet, doers of evil they are. Furthermore, Americans must be realistic about Islamic extremism: its anti-Americanism, its anti-Semitism, its murderousness. We were shielded from the stark truth for too long. If CBS's act did nothing else, it reminded those who may have forgotten: This is why we fight.

-- The body of Chandra Levy, the 24-year-old intern who had been the mimistress of Rep. Gary Condit (D., Calif.), was found in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C., 13 months after she disappeared, and the tabloids and the cable news shows took up the story once again -- though not, as the New York Times sniffily noted, in the "all-Chandra-all-the-time" mode of last summer. September 11 has happened, and we are now serious. This is partly true (would that we were even more serious). But it is also true that when a congressman's evasions materially harm an investigation into a possible murder, and when the congressman himself is a suspect, that is a serious story. Among other things, Condit (who will not be re-elected, having lost a primary) sits on the Select Committee on Intelligence. Should there be a blackmailable person on such a committee in wartime -- or any time?

-- There is grumbling among the students of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High ScSchool. Are teachers assigning too much homework? Is the lunch hour being shortened? No, the grousing is over this year's graduation speaker, Condoleezza Rice. The problem is that, as national security adviser, she is involved in the effort to protect the nation -- including the towns of Bethesda and Chevy Chase -- from murderous fanatics bent on our destruction. Perennial pacifist Colman McCarthy, formerly of the Washington Post and now a teacher of Peace Studies at the school, praised the protesting students, saying "students deserve better than someone who advocates, as Rice does, sending U.S. pilots to kill human beings in Afghanistan." The kids are lucky to have her: She will be able to teach them about real peace, and what it takes to achieve it.

-- Norman Mailer, speaking recently at a panel sponsored by the New YoYork Times on the topic "Writers and Cold War Culture," described life as a writer in the 1950s: "We writers felt much more excitement than today. We felt like the Russian dissidents felt later." In the '50s, when Mailer was co-founding the Village Voice, flacking for the Soviet Union, and glorifying the liberatory aspects of rape, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was in the Gulag, enduring brutal conditions and doing his writing on tiny scraps of paper, which he had to destroy after memorizing their contents. In the '60s, when Mailer was writing a monthly column for Esquire, running for mayor of New York City, protesting the Vietnam War, reporting on the political conventions, and generally being lionized, Solzhenitsyn was having his manuscripts and archives confiscated by the police and being expelled from the writers' union. Later, while Solzhenitsyn was being branded a traitor and exiled from his country, Mailer was making movies, writing verse, and publishing books on the free soil of his homeland. Yes, Mailer was just like a Russian dissident.

-- The Nov. 19, 2001, issue of National Review contained some asastonishing pictures from the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog then current. A & F were using the naked or near-naked bodies of young adults in a big way to attract customers. They have now gone further, marketing a line of thong underwear for children. Thong underwear, for readers not au courant in these matters (and who slept through the Clinton scandals), is minimal and, well, rearless. This new A & F line comes in sizes for girls aged 10 to 16, and some items have slogans printed on the front: "eye candy" and "wink wink," for example. Are there really parents who would be happy for their ten-year-old daughter to wear thong panties boasting the legend "eye candy"? Possibly not: A & F stock has been enduring a long slump, and there is, as the saying goes, no such thing as bad publicity. So perhaps it's all just a stunt. This is the optimistic explanation. The other one doesn't bear thinking about.

-- The Catholic sex scandals have taken down Milwaukee archbishop ReRembert Weakland. Twenty years ago, Weakland fell in love with Paul Marcoux, a thirtysomething theology student who, it is clear, played Weakland like a banjo. According to a painful letter published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Weakland ended the affair and took up again his broken vow of celibacy. His repentance was incomplete, however, for he later paid $450,000 out of diocesan funds to buy Marcoux's silence. This was not only a theft of the donations of Milwaukee's Catholics, it was also a continuation of the offense. Arthur Dimmesdale, the adulterous clergyman in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, found at the end of his life that the guilt of moral leaders can be purged only by honesty. The Roman Catholic Church is learning this lesson.

-- The late George Willard of Carl Junction, Mo., achieved modest fame ththree years ago when a television show in England featured his living arrangements. George shared a trailer with a pony, Pixel, whom he introduced to viewers as his "wife." The show came furnished with all the obvious jokes appropriate to Mr. Willard's domestic set-up: "stable relationships," "rolls in the hay," and so on. It highlighted the phenomenon called, by those involved (those capable of speech, that is), "zoophilia," which Messrs. Merriam and Webster define to be "an erotic fixation on animals." The particular mode in which Mr. Willard manifested his fixation on Pixel was actually illegal in 29 states at the time. That number is now 30: Embarrassed by the publicity that followed the TV program, Missouri legislators have outlawed zoophilia. The widowed Mrs. Willard has been sold to a man in Texas a state that has no zoophobic legislation on its books.

-- Australia and Turkey are about as far apart as two countries can be, anand would seem to have nothing at all in common. It is one of the curiosities of history that both received their greatest impetus to a modern national consciousness from the same events, a series of battles fought from April to December of 1915, known collectively as Gallipoli. In an attempt to get the Ottoman Empire out of World War I, Britain mounted a land and sea assault on southern Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula. Two divisions of Australian and New Zealand troops were included in the land operations. The whole campaign was a disaster, and more than 8,000 Australians died, along with 2,400 New Zealanders. These losses, from small populations in young countries, made a deep impression. ANZAC Day (April 25th) is still celebrated with great solemnity in the Antipodes. The Turks' victory made the reputation of their commander, Mustafa Kemal, who went on to create the modern Turkish republic, somewhat immodestly awarding himself the surname "Ataturk" ("Father Turk") along the way. Ataturk is long gone from us -- he died in 1938 -- but a dwindling corps of Gallipoli veterans have shown up every year on ANZAC Day to honor their comrades' sacrifice. No longer: The last survivor of the Gallipoli ANZACs faded away on May 16 in Hobart, Tasmania, at the age of 103. He had marched in a parade on ANZAC Day just a few weeks earlier. "Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved . . ."

-- Stephen Jay Gould was a better popularizer than he was a scientist. NoNothing wrong with that -- knowledge is not the property of the elect. His written chautauqua lectures often took an impetus, however, from his left-wing politics. Sociobiologists, who look for clues to human nature in the deposits of evolution, were anathema to him, since leftist man, who understands the processes of history, must be the maker of his own destiny. Creationists were a bumbling God squad -- so much so that he felt he could afford, in his later years, to treat them with some forbearance. He wrote a sprightly essay on Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak, and his 20- year bout with cancer made him a powerful advocate for medical marijuana. R.I.P.

-- Sam Snead was one of golf's greatest swingers, and greatest cusses ---- everyone has a Sam story, or twenty, not all of them fit for polite company, and not all of them pleasant. Truth is, he could be beyond irascible. But he was indisputably a legend, beginning his life in the woods of Virginia, swatting at stones, acorns, and other things with sticks. Soon that swing became almost unbelievably smooth and sweet, much gawked at, impossible to imitate. Snead was a greatly athletic person, delighting in kicking the ceiling of most any room, for the amazement of friends (and others). He also lasted a long, long time, in his sport: At 52, he was the oldest man ever to win a PGA Tour event. Despite his seven "majors" -- same as Tiger Woods has now, by the way, at the age of 26 -- he never won the U.S. Open, the blot on his fabulous record. That record includes 81 Tour wins: the most ever. Of three great players whom we normally group -- Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, and Byron Nelson -- only Nelson is left. The legendary, inimitable Sam Snead -- "Slammin' Sammy Snead" -- is dead at 89. R.I.P.