Several folks sent us, with accompanying expressions of outrage, articles detailing that "billions of dollars in federal welfare money is piling up in the Treasury, unused by state officials, who won control of the money in 1996 by arguing that they knew best how to spend it for the benefit of poor people." All true and horrifying. In many cases, it's because states have been unexpectedly "successful" at throwing people off welfare (and, after a brief, employed interlude, onto the street.)

But it's also a case where over-agitated lefties need to read the fine print: turns out states can save unused money for future years. Many are hedging against the expectation that the current boom economy won't last, and demand for welfare will increase in the next year or two. In that case, not drawing on that money now makes sense, kind of. To question it, you have to question the whole premise of welfare reform in the first place--that it's OK to let some people starve. Then, it makes sense to allow some to starve now so fewer will later. Rather than criticize the practice of not using all the money now, why not go to the root of it: the world's wealthiest country shouldn't have people starving and living on the street. Period.--Geov Parrish

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gases (such as carbon-dioxide) included provisions for "carbon sinks"--environments like rainforests and peat-bogs that absorb carbon-dioxide from the air and turn it into solid forms of organic material, like wood or peat. Preserving and expanding forests and other carbon sinks can help reduce greenhouse gasses. Here's a new twist: the U.S. wants the wood and paper buried in landfills to be considered carbon sinks, too, which would make it easier to achieve the goals set by the Kyoto agreement without actually reducing pollutants. A recent study by the government's Forest Products Laboratory in Madison claims that 70% of the carbon in paper and 97% of it in wood remains in landfills and doesn't return to the atmosphere. It is true that landfills do lock away carbon, and that young forests tend to absorb more carbon from the air than older forests. However, the research doesn't count the amount of carbon released from fossil fuels to run the chainsaws, logging trucks, lumber mills, and pulp mills to make wood and paper products. Nor do they count the amount of carbon that would otherwise stay safely locked up in the forest if it were never cut in the first place.--John Chapman (info from New Scientist, 1/30/99)

The permanent hiring of Joseph Olchefske to run Seattle's schools is good news only in the narrow sense that he's not retired military. But Olchefske, who in his less visible days as the district's head financial guy served largely as the administrative conduit for the ideas of millionaire pro-business School Board member Don Nielsen, is no friend of progressives. He has pushed hard for the commercialization of schools, and in his interim tenure sought to distance himself from John Stanford in all the wrong ways: like by trying to dismantle international schools, which happen to be one of Stanford's really good ideas. John & Joseph do, of course, share one thing in common: both came into the job with no experience in actual education. Stanford, at least, had some political savvy; Olchefske's background is as a bean-counter, with a lifetime dedicated to allocating money for the little funding units. That's not good news for parents and friends of Seattle's schools; the attitude that our children are "clients" and schools should be run like businesses has all sorts of dire implications. Yuk.--G.P.

While on schools, from our mailbag: "A study comparing the ethics of M.B.A. students with those of felons taking college classes found that the inmates showed just as much integrity as the business students, and sometimes more, when faced with difficult business dilemmas." From the Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com.--G.P.

A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there. It all means so little to our national political leaders. While Clinton brags about a new missile defense system for the U.S., nothing is said about the old one. Yes, I'm talking about the THAAD program, which has been one of the biggest failures in national history. Built for the Army by Lockheed Martin (the largest defense contractor in the U.S.) the THAAD (Theater High-Altitude Area Defense) system has never been deployed, in spite of the $4 billion in taxpayer money already spent to develop it. Finally some Congressmen are wanting to end the program, after THAAD failed to hit five targets in five consecutive tests. But as spectacularly wasteful as THAAD is, it may be easily overshadowed by the new missile defense project. Here's what the Wall Street Journal (those pragmatists) had to say about this new scheme: "...[Defense Secretary] Cohen said the Pentagon would plan to spend $6.6 billion for the possible deployment of a national missile system over the next six years. But it isn't clear that the money ever will be translated from theory into practice ... Air Force Gen. Lester Lyles, the director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, noted that testing of two critical parts of the national antimissile system, the booster rocket and the actual weapon that would destroy an incoming missile, won't be finished until 2003. It is unlikely that a final decision to deploy would be made before those tests are completed."--Maria Tomchick

One more quote ... an excerpt from Henry Hyde's closing remarks at the Senate trial: "As for the House Managers, I want to tell you and our extraordinary staff how proud I am of your service. For myself I cannot find words of praise strong enough, so I will rely on the inaudible language of the heart. I have gone through it all at your side, the media condemnations, the hate mail, the insults shouted in public, the attempts at intimidation, the death threats and even the disapproval of our colleagues."

At the risk of both adding to those condemnations and stating the obvious, maybe Hyde and company have gotten so much flak BECAUSE THEY'RE WRONG. Their sheer arrogance at considering 200 million of us to be ignorant rubes who just don't get it has done more than Clinton ever dreamed of (and I'm sure he's dreamed of it) to alienate ordinary Americans from politics. And while we're repulsed, the mice are throwing one helluva party in D.C. at our expense.--G.P.