Bad Cop

WASHINGTON -- A reporter who had covered White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu for a decade in New Hampshire got a call from the then-governor on the day before she left the state to take a new job and get married."

While the lawyer for one Baltimore police officer warned of her client being judged too quickly after allegations surfaced that he helped cover-up a child's killing when the rifle was found in his car, another officer apologized for his own misdeeds in a kickback case. In the middle was Baltimore's embattled police commissioner, Frederick H. Bealefeld III, who came out swinging against bad cops and a perception that his department is full of them. It was a day full of dueling quotes.

WASHINGTON - When President Bush hits the road to promote his Social Security plan, he has tough words for lawmakers who would put off action until another day. "The question confronting the Congress is, `Do you have the political will to do something about it?"' Bush told a crowd yesterday in Galveston, Texas. In private at the White House, though, Bush is playing the good cop to his public bad cop. In casual meetings behind closed doors, Bush is reassuring lawmakers that he will cover them politically if they join his effort to revamp the retirement program.

Melissa Leo has officially entered overdrive. Her last two years have made even the half-decade she spent playing a Charm City cop in "Homicide" look like a modest accomplishment. She hasn't taken a timeout since she earned a best actress Academy Award nomination for playing a struggling upstate New Yorker who smuggles illegal aliens in "Frozen River" (2008). She has acted in a string of films. "Conviction," with Hilary Swank, opened this weekend in Baltimore. "The Dry Land," with America Ferrarra, appears on DVD next month and "The Fighter" with Mark Wahlberg, will start rolling into theaters in December.

Melissa Leo has officially entered overdrive. Her last two years have made even the half-decade she spent playing a Charm City cop in "Homicide" look like a modest accomplishment. She hasn't taken a timeout since she earned a best actress Academy Award nomination for playing a struggling upstate New Yorker who smuggles illegal aliens in "Frozen River" (2008). She has acted in a string of films. "Conviction," with Hilary Swank, opened this weekend in Baltimore. "The Dry Land," with America Ferrarra, appears on DVD next month and "The Fighter" with Mark Wahlberg, will start rolling into theaters in December.

It turns out that George Bush doesn't understand the theory behind the tax bubble any better than anyone else.George Bush is the good cop and John Sununu the bad cop. It's the bad cop you remember.

Jesse Helms is the bad cop, Bob Dole the good cop.NATO bombed that air base in Croatia as if it really meant for the Serbs to quit napalming civilians, and the Serbs don't know what to make of it.Massive police raids on open air drug markets are a good thing unless you live where the drug markets move next.

Despite some superpower tensions, the United States and the Soviet Union are continuing to play their bad cop/good cop routine, hoping to force Iraq into defeat. With each flexing of U.S. muscle and each burst of sweet talk from the Kremlin, the trap closes ever tighter on Saddam Hussein and his battered armies.At this stage, Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev find themselves a vital fortnight apart on timing, with Mr. Bush demanding Iraq's withdrawal a week from today and Mr. Gorbachev willing to give him 21 days.

Such an odd couple. One's a working-class mate, a gangling fletch of a man, big-eyed and tumultuous, with a ragged mop of hair and a fund of ready resentments, spitting anger and energy. He could be a Boomtown Rat.The other's a trim and tidy intellectual, under a neat spritz of TV-weatherman's hair, who can discuss Freud and Oedipus as they play across Irish literature, or the nature of dramatic structure in a voice both gentle and exquisite.What a team. Mutt and Jeff? Abbott and Costello?

Jimmy Johnson would have cut someone.Mike Ditka would have ranted and raved and maybe thrown a chair.Barry Switzer would have started cussing.Ravens coach Ted Marchibroda is too nice for all that.When he wanted to send an angry message to his players yesterday, he just raised a solitary index finger and uttered two words."One year," he said to a roomful of reporters at the Ravens' Owings Mills training complex.It wasn't as loud as Ditka, as chilling as Johnson or as profane as Switzer, but it was all Marchibroda had to say to send a series of devastating messages to his players in the wake of their 31-17 loss to the Steelers on Sunday at Three Rivers Stadium.

S aad Maan al-Mosawi came all the way from Baghdad to Baltimore to learn how Americans police their cities, and here is one of the first questions he posed to a top department official: "Do you have community policing in Baltimore?" It's not an easy question to answer. After years of cops believing that wholesale arrests were the way out of an epidemic of violence, Baltimore police returned to community policing with neighborhood walks and more outreach to help regain the trust of a distrustful citizenry.

The way the media are chattering this week, it seems all TV glory emanates from The Sopranos. The tube as we know it has been changed forever by the daring, depth and resonance of HBO's returning series king. In the concluding days of its reign, this tale of two types of "family" is being anointed with every superlative known to the critical class. All of it, of course, magnificently earned. The Sopranos stands as timelessly acute entertainment -- a modern American Shakespearean play. There's so much to admire, to savor, to treasure, to revisit.

WASHINGTON -- Immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Big Easy, Saints owner Tom Benson indicated that the National Football League team would remain loyal to New Orleans. Apparently he's had a change of heart. Rumor has it he's now considering moving the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles or San Antonio. Not only that, but Mr. Benson has an escape clause that lets him void his Superdome lease without paying any penalties or repaying any subsidies the team has gotten so far. Mayor Ray Nagin, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the good citizens of New Orleans are shocked.

WASHINGTON - When President Bush hits the road to promote his Social Security plan, he has tough words for lawmakers who would put off action until another day. "The question confronting the Congress is, `Do you have the political will to do something about it?"' Bush told a crowd yesterday in Galveston, Texas. In private at the White House, though, Bush is playing the good cop to his public bad cop. In casual meetings behind closed doors, Bush is reassuring lawmakers that he will cover them politically if they join his effort to revamp the retirement program.

WASHINGTON - Until last week, President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell were putting on a pretty good version of the old good-cop, bad-cop routine regarding Iraq. The president was (and continues to be) the bad cop, full of threat and bluster as he made a conspicuous show of his impatience over the pace and skimpy results of the U.N. weapons inspection team. But Mr. Powell was the good cop, tempering his boss' hard line with sweet reasonableness to the point of agreeing the inspectors should be given more time.

Denzel Washington does a cocksure turn in Training Day as a crooked undercover narcotics cop instructing an idealistic new partner, Ethan Hawke, in the ways of the street. That may be enough to transform a shallow picture with delusions of grandeur into a crowd-pleasing hit. American actors rarely get a chance to sound every key in their register. This whole movie is built on Washington's seizing that opportunity while he criss-crosses Los Angeles in a souped-up, lowriding 1978 Monte Carlo.

WASHINGTON -- Immediately after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Big Easy, Saints owner Tom Benson indicated that the National Football League team would remain loyal to New Orleans. Apparently he's had a change of heart. Rumor has it he's now considering moving the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles or San Antonio. Not only that, but Mr. Benson has an escape clause that lets him void his Superdome lease without paying any penalties or repaying any subsidies the team has gotten so far. Mayor Ray Nagin, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and the good citizens of New Orleans are shocked.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton played down assertions yesterday that U.S. warplanes would act alone to stop the Bosnian Serb onslaught in Sarajevo, predicting confidently that European allies will back his initiative for tougher military action to stop the bloodshed.As NATO ambassadors met in Brussels to consider U.S. proposals for greater Western military intervention in Bosnia, Mr. Clinton told reporters here: "We are working with the allies. We believe we will be able to work through to a common position."

YEAH, I KNOW: The legendary Johnnie Cochran came to Baltimore, and now he, Billy Murphy and Dwight Pettit are teaming up to represent the family of the late Lawrence "Fat Herb" Hubbard, shot in the back of the head by a cop and memorialized as a martyr. Big story. A racial and political bonfire. "Mr. Cochran," Murphy said, "is here to heal."Maybe Mr. Cochran would like to volunteer at Maryland Shock Trauma Center.At least 15 people were shot, one fatally, over the weekend in the city that bleeds.

THE KOSOVO problem is not solved. Just possibly, the war between Albanian rebels and Serbian forces will abate. If so, credit would go to a strange alliance between the United States and Russia, based on their open disagreements.Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic reneged on negotiating with Ibrahim Rugova, the elected leader of the Albanian majority in Kosovo province. As a result, the Kosovo Liberation Army sprang up, launching rebellion with weapons procured across the border in Albania.