Hard Choices

THE FORMERLY obscure province of Kosovo is now etched in the public's mind. So is Bosnia. As are Rwanda, Iraq and Iran. All have received extraordinary attention, and for good reason. Strife, both internal and external, attracts diplomatic and media attention. Conflict generates news. Peaceful progress does not.The fact that nations such as Mongolia or Mali or Malawi have not received such recognition should surprise no one. Yet a remarkable "good news" story exists in these and a small number of similarly often-overlooked nations: Against all odds, they are building a quiet record of democratic progress.

LIMERICK, Ireland -- When it comes to giving peace a boost on the Irish island, there's nothing like a visit by President Clinton.During his three-day all-Ireland barnstorming tour that ended yesterday, Clinton emerged as the No. 1 cheerleader -- and backer -- of the historic Northern Ireland peace accord. He lectured often bitter political foes. He warned the public that there could be more bombs like the blast Aug. 15 in Omagh, the bloodiest attack of Northern Ireland's terrorist troubles.

Washington. -- Democrats are trying to revive their flagging spirits and reverse their sagging fortunes by attacking the ''contract'' that Republican congressional candidates have signed. The core of the contract is a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, an idea many Democrats and much of the intelligentsia call ''simplistic.''But now comes James Q. Wilson, past president of the American Political Science Association and no simpleton, defending the amendment as a sound response to the current tensions between American's political and constitutional systems.

Offensive AnalogyWhat does welfare reform have to do with the Holocaust?That is the question one must pose to Richard Dowling, of the Maryland Catholic Conference (letter, April 6).Forced abortion by the Nazis against Polish women was a crime against humanity.A society that seeks to ensure that "poor" women have the same right to make decisions about their reproductive health that "wealthier" women possess is a humane one.Surely one can recognize the difference without the use of misplaced and offensive analogies.

Washington.--Since the House vote to raise taxes considerably and cut spending slightly, the Democratic wing of the political class is preening about the ''hard choices'' it made. It chose to preserve every program, prune a few, and grasp a larger share of taxpayers' resources.The honey subsidy (a relic of the Second World War, when honey was a sugar substitute and beeswax was used for waterproofing) survived. The wool subsidy (a relic of the immediate postwar period, when the military worried about having enough wool for uniforms)

WE HAVE met the enemy and he is us," said Pogo Possum, the Walt Kelly cartoon character.Pogo's classic wisdom should have been etched over the U.S. Capitol's granite portals.When the dust cleared from the Battle of the Budget, the enemy was clear. It was all of us.Sure, the $500 billion deficit-cutting deal passed, but only in an orgy of selfishness, egoism, fear and protecting No. 1. I can't remember Congress slinking away from a big vote with such fatalistic shame.Okay, it wasn't a Feel Good vote.

WASHINGTON -- The awful specter of ancient conflicts is haunting Europe again, and the United States can't escape it.The horror of Bosnia is just the biggest explosion in an arc of tension stretching from Latvia on the Baltic around the periphery of the old Soviet Union to Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus.Some of the conflicts stem from interethnic and religious rivalries that predate the post-World War II division of the Continent; others are chaotic spinoffs from the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Washington -- Record high deficits are the single most important problem facing economic policy makers today. In this election-recession year politicians unable to resist the siren song of tax cuts and pump-priming spending increases may make the deficit problem worse. In that context, the president's budget is a surprisingly responsible document.The budget does contain some creative accounting and blue smoke and mirrors. That is bad budget practice and bad politics. It is bad budget practice because everyone who wants deeper tax cuts or higher spending will adopt and expand the gimmicks in the budget to create the illusion such proposals won't increase the deficit.

The word from the streets and shopping malls is: Maryland's state troopers and medevac helicopters are the political equivalent of motherhood and apple pie.Gov. William Donald Schaefer's plan to lay off troopers and ground some medevac flights hit a nerve with a wide range of taxpayers interviewed yesterday. Many said they'd be willing to pay higher taxes to avoid such cutbacks."To me, when you talk about life-and-death services like the medevac helicopters, that's something that should be kept sacrosanct," said Robert Pace, an environmental consultant interviewed in Towson.

Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly, heretofore a champion of the Earth, has come out with a worrisome pronouncement:"I do not intend to include 60 percent of North Carolina or 40 percent of Maryland's Eastern Shore as wetlands," he told the House Public Works Committee. That was in response to a storm of criticism raised by farmers, landowners and developers over the language of a 1989 Army Corps of Engineers manual which widely increased the number of property owners whose land might be subject to wetlands regulation.

Palo Alto, Calif. -President Barack Obama has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country - on a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The U.S. must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from Latin America. It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent, or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare.

With tax revenues continuing to fall short of projections, Gov.-elect Martin O'Malley is under increasing pressure to curb promised new spending. That's not necessarily bad advice. Until the state's structural deficit is addressed, and a projected multibillion-dollar budget shortfall is no longer looming, fiscal restraint is in order. But there is at least one program where Mr. O'Malley needs to stick to his pledge to spend substantially more money next year: school construction. As a candidate for governor, Baltimore's mayor said he would set aside $400 million to help build and renovate public schools and $250 million annually after that.

Del. Robert L. Flanagan knows a thing or two about alternative means of transportation. He rode the bus to Gonzaga High School in Washington. He took the train around Boston while studying at Harvard. Then, for a time, he rode a nuclear submarine in the Pacific. But for most of his adult life, Flanagan has driven from his suburban home to his office in a car by himself. The man who would be state transportation secretary knows a thing or two, then, about traffic and congestion and what nags commuters.

THE FORMERLY obscure province of Kosovo is now etched in the public's mind. So is Bosnia. As are Rwanda, Iraq and Iran. All have received extraordinary attention, and for good reason. Strife, both internal and external, attracts diplomatic and media attention. Conflict generates news. Peaceful progress does not.The fact that nations such as Mongolia or Mali or Malawi have not received such recognition should surprise no one. Yet a remarkable "good news" story exists in these and a small number of similarly often-overlooked nations: Against all odds, they are building a quiet record of democratic progress.

LIMERICK, Ireland -- When it comes to giving peace a boost on the Irish island, there's nothing like a visit by President Clinton.During his three-day all-Ireland barnstorming tour that ended yesterday, Clinton emerged as the No. 1 cheerleader -- and backer -- of the historic Northern Ireland peace accord. He lectured often bitter political foes. He warned the public that there could be more bombs like the blast Aug. 15 in Omagh, the bloodiest attack of Northern Ireland's terrorist troubles.

Washington. -- Democrats are trying to revive their flagging spirits and reverse their sagging fortunes by attacking the ''contract'' that Republican congressional candidates have signed. The core of the contract is a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, an idea many Democrats and much of the intelligentsia call ''simplistic.''But now comes James Q. Wilson, past president of the American Political Science Association and no simpleton, defending the amendment as a sound response to the current tensions between American's political and constitutional systems.

Offensive AnalogyWhat does welfare reform have to do with the Holocaust?That is the question one must pose to Richard Dowling, of the Maryland Catholic Conference (letter, April 6).Forced abortion by the Nazis against Polish women was a crime against humanity.A society that seeks to ensure that "poor" women have the same right to make decisions about their reproductive health that "wealthier" women possess is a humane one.Surely one can recognize the difference without the use of misplaced and offensive analogies.

WE HAVE met the enemy and he is us," said Pogo Possum, the Walt Kelly cartoon character.Pogo's classic wisdom should have been etched over the U.S. Capitol's granite portals.When the dust cleared from the Battle of the Budget, the enemy was clear. It was all of us.Sure, the $500 billion deficit-cutting deal passed, but only in an orgy of selfishness, egoism, fear and protecting No. 1. I can't remember Congress slinking away from a big vote with such fatalistic shame.Okay, it wasn't a Feel Good vote.

Washington.--Since the House vote to raise taxes considerably and cut spending slightly, the Democratic wing of the political class is preening about the ''hard choices'' it made. It chose to preserve every program, prune a few, and grasp a larger share of taxpayers' resources.The honey subsidy (a relic of the Second World War, when honey was a sugar substitute and beeswax was used for waterproofing) survived. The wool subsidy (a relic of the immediate postwar period, when the military worried about having enough wool for uniforms)

WASHINGTON -- The awful specter of ancient conflicts is haunting Europe again, and the United States can't escape it.The horror of Bosnia is just the biggest explosion in an arc of tension stretching from Latvia on the Baltic around the periphery of the old Soviet Union to Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus.Some of the conflicts stem from interethnic and religious rivalries that predate the post-World War II division of the Continent; others are chaotic spinoffs from the collapse of the Soviet empire.