Crime Bill

Pay attention, voters, because we are approaching Electio Day, the day when you, in a glorious affirmation of the democratic process, will exercise your precious constitutional right to elect some goober to Congress.But before you vote, you should familiarize yourself with the issues. This year there are four of them:1. Health CareThis issue got started when the Clinton administration stayed up for 168 straight nights and produced a massive and extremely detailed National Health Care Plan.

Trying to capitalize on one of the hot issues of the fall campaign, Republican U.S. Senate challenger Bill Brock has gone on television with a commercial implying that incumbent Democratic Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes is soft on crime.The advertisement states that Mr. Sarbanes voted to strike death penalty provisions from the recent crime bill and opposed mandatory sentences for crimes involving a gun and for selling drugs to children."Now he tells us he's tough on crime," the narrator says. "The more you hear about Senator Sarbanes, the more he sounds like part of the problem."

THE MOST disappointing aspect of the new crime bill is that Congress has not set aside any money to punish those who have committed white-collar crimes.Since white-collar crime is now growing faster than blue-collar crime, you would think that some provisions would have been made to deal with the problem.Stephanie Ross, a white-collar crime consultant, said that while it is hoped that the new bill can reduce street crimes, Congress has thrown in the towel about stopping criminal activity on Wall Street and in various halls of government.

WASHINGTON -- The ceremony marking President Clinton's signing of the crime bill was a true political extravaganza, but it also was a throwback that probably has little meaning for skeptical voters these days. As a media event, it was a classic -- worthy of Buckingham Palace or at least the days when Mike Deaver arranged such televised spectacles as backdrops for President Ronald Reagan.There were 2,000-plus guests on the White House lawn, including a phalanx of uniformed police and representatives of community organizations and groups of crime victims.

WASHINGTON -- The crime bill, President Clinton has promised, will put more police on the street, build more prisons and "give our young people something to say 'yes' to."But some government workers may wish they'd said 'no' to the law signed by Mr. Clinton yesterday when they discover that the $30 billion crime-fighting measure will be funded by federal job cuts."Mr. Clinton, Don't Cut Feds to Pay for Cops!!!" begs the headline of a recent Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association newsletter.

SMALL PROBLEMS first: What do you call an 11-year-old hit man? Not a hit child surely. That makes him sound like a Hollywood moppet who's dynamite at the box office. Those cute "Home Alone" movies, chewing gum for the brain, spring to mind.Eleven-year-old Robert Sandifer (height: 4 feet 8 inches) was a real-life instance of what can happen when you leave a kid home alone.He was bumped off by his gang's teen-age superiors last week after botching a killing in a Chicago slum. Firing a semiautomatic pistol into a group of teen-agers, he shot one boy in the hand and killed a 14-year-old girl.

School officials have undercut Stadium areaMayor Kurt Schmoke and President Phillip Farfel and the rest of the school board have abandoned the educational needs of Baltimore's Memorial Stadium residents.They have promised and lied, connived and back-stabbed those city taxpayers who have entrusted these individuals and their agencies with the welfare of their school children.The teachers and parents have spent more than three years and all summer preparing for the time when they could have had a school in their community.

THE CAPITULATION of six frightened, feeble, supine Republican senators on the so-called crime bill does not bode well for the debate over health care legislation. It suggests that some Republicans are still playing by rules invented by and for Democrats. If those rules are followed on health, we will get some kind of reform bill -- and that will be terrible for the country and politically damaging for Republicans as well.The rules that were followed on the crime bill are as follows: The Democrats propose a huge federal spending program to address a problem that ought not to be handled by the federal government in the first place.

It would be easy -- and wrong -- to over-interpret the symbolic meaning of the Rosa Parks story. The black woman who helped start the modern civil rights movement by refusing to accept the indignity imposed on her by a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 is subjected to the indignity and pain of being beaten and robbed by a black man in Detroit, Mich., in 1994.No one should believe America has replaced its "white man problem" with a "black man problem." White racism of a different sort than the 1950s version still is part of the explanation for the economic and social gulf between the races today.

THE CONGRESS of the United States has brought forth a crime bill. Now all of us can sleep better at night, right?Wrong. The federal government has undertaken to spend $30 billion of our dollars (what ever happened to deficit reduction?) to fight not crime but the appearance of political indifference to crime.That's what the bill was about. It was an opportunity for the therapeutic set (liberal Democrats) to portray themselves as Clint Eastwood. President Clinton went so far as to cast the struggle as one between the forces of the National Rifle Association and those of the police and "honest, law-abiding citizens."