Secretary Of State

MASON CITY, Iowa -- Listen to any politician for long, and you can expect to catch him in a fib. But at a stop in Algona, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. opened with a whopper that no voter familiar with the Delaware Democrat would ever believe. "I'll be brief," he promised - and then talked for half an hour. Mr. Biden has often been ridiculed for needless verbosity. Critics lamented that during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., he needed 13 minutes to ask one question.

WASHINGTON -- Having worked for six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, I nearly fell off my chair the other day when I read Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's comment to reporters that diplomacy wasn't about making deals. Maybe "making deals" is too glib a phrase for her, but it's precisely what effective American diplomacy in the Middle East is mostly about. Her legacy may well be judged by that standard. The secretary is absolutely correct in asserting, as she did, that diplomacy is more than deal-making.

The text of Gov. Parris N. Glendening's State of the State address delivered to a joint session of the Maryland House and Senate yesterday:Senate President Mike Miller; Speaker Cas Taylor; members of the General Assembly; Lt. Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; Attorney General Joe Curran; Comptroller Bobby Swann; Comptroller-elect William Donald Schaefer; Treasurer Richard Dixon; Chief Judge Bob Bell; Secretary of State John Willis; my wife, Frances Anne,...

Here is an edited excerpt of an editorial from the Boston Globe, which was published Wednesday.THE prospect of voters one day casting ballots on the Internet makes some people nervous. But it shouldn't.Recent tests in Iowa and earlier this year in the state of Washington indicate that voter anonymity can be maintained and the system can be secured against fraud. More testing would have to be done before people vote from home computers in a national election. Chet Culver, Iowa's secretary of state, figures it will be here in 10 years.

VIENNA -- The state has pushed back the planned completion date for its $33 million acquisition of 58,000 Eastern Shore acres owned by Chesapeake Forest Products -- noting the complexity of the deal, the largest ever in the state.Previously set for Tuesday, the closing now is set for Sept. 2, state officials and industry spokesmen said yesterday.Gov. Parris N. Glendening, who took a tour yesterday of some of the parcels to be preserved along the Nanticoke River, said the delay did not indicate that the overall deal was in trouble.

WASHINGTON -- A few years ago, Richard Holbrooke's dominant, even overbearing, personality got him cut out of the center of power. Now it's dealing him back in.In 1995, when he was the State Department official responsible for Europe, Holbrooke found himself excluded from key strategy sessions intended to end the war in Bosnia, at least in part because of his abrasive style.But once the course was set, Holbrooke became the point man, pressuring and pummeling the Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats into a deal -- the Dayton accords -- that ended the worst ethnic violence in Europe since World War II and finally won respect for President Clinton's international leadership.

WASHINGTON -- In China and Kosovo, two of this century's durable arguments are resonating loudly. As a result, two thinkers not often thought of nowadays -- Hannah Arendt and Robert Lansing -- are again pertinent to U.S. foreign policy.Wages of tyrannyPresident Clinton and President Jiang Zemin delicately exchanged theories about the prerequisites of a nation's progress. Obliquely referring to the suppression ("resolute measures") of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration for democracy, China's president said the suppression was necessary for "stability," which sustained China's progress.

CHICAGO -- If Glenn Poshard seems to be rowing toward his goal with muffled oars, he can argue that this is one reason why he should reach his goal. His goal is to be the first Democrat elected governor of Illinois since 1974. If, as he expects, he is outspent 3-to-1 (say, $15 million to $5 million), that will be partly because he offends a faction of his party that deserves to be offended, and partly because his Republican opponent is raising and spending money in ways that suggest that Illinois Republicans have been in power a tad too long.

WHETHER the peace between Israel and the Palestinians can be preserved is an open question because the will on each side to achieve it is in doubt. Many Palestinians don't want to, their regime has not proven itself otherwise. Many Israelis don't want to; some are in government. Terrorists manipulate both to predictable provocations of each other.The Clinton administration is right to make every effort to broker this peace despite the pessimism, to risk failure, to take the chance. With mediator Dennis Ross in the Middle East this weekend and a trip by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to restart negotiations possible this month, her blunt speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday brought a welcome, tough-love urgency to the issue.

Abandon Whitewater. Think Huangate.Senators insist that the First Amendment protection of free speech covers campaign spending. Because money talks.At last we have a secretary of state who speaks beaucoup foreign languages and, even more remarkable, lucid and fluent English.Downtown will finally get big bookstores, right up there with Naplis and Bel Air.Pub Date: 2/24/97

The negotiations that led to former President Bill Clinton's secret mission to North Korea began when two U.S. journalists were seized by the isolated Stalinist state, and were spurred on by the administration's hope that they might lead to a resumption of gridlocked disarmament talks, according to people close to the process. The goal was a specific deal: If the United States showed respect by dispatching a high-level emissary to Pyongyang, the North would release journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were arrested along the border with China on March 17. "This has been an orchestrated diplomatic process, carefully calibrated in both capitals," said a person who has been close to the exchanges since they began.

Every so often I find myself stepping into the minefield that is public discussion of guns, gun violence, gun control and how these things relate to the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Because of misleading public statements by the president of the United States and his secretary of state, it's now time to do so again. President Barack Obama said on April 16 that 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns came from the United States. The comment came during a joint press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon addressing the raging violence south of the border, as Mexican drug gangs battle each other and the government in gruesome fashion.

CHICAGO - Of all the titles that Bill Richardson has held in his storied political career, the one he seems to like most is memorialized in Guinness World Records. He brags about it often: the time he shook 13,392 hands in an eight-hour period to break a nearly century-old record. When President-elect Barack Obama announced yesterday that he will make Richardson his commerce secretary, Obama noted all of the most relevant achievements: Richardson's stints as U.N. ambassador, congressman, U.S. energy secretary and his current post, governor of New Mexico.

"The American people are responding with great emotion and with great pride in our system that we have seen this latest step in reconciliation with respect to our race relations. ... We have not completely reconciled within my society, with my country. But what Mr. Obama represents is the best of America." Former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "I think that he helped to touch the core of what our ancestors had been struggling with for the last 200 years. So all of those unknown people who have struggled through slavery, through segregation and through adversity based on our race and not on our intelligence and our minds, that he now sets a new tone for people to look beyond race in moving this country forward."

A legal challenge to proposed ballot language for November's slot-machine referendum has mostly failed, although yesterday the state's highest court upheld a lower court's order to add one word to the hotly contested question. Last week, a panel of Anne Arundel Circuit Court judges ruled that the proposed ballot language was misleading but could be fixed by adding a single word to clarify that state education programs would be the primary and not sole recipients of anticipated revenues.

Paycheck piffle One of the more peculiar complaints of late from Maryland's GOP leadership is that Gov. Martin O'Malley's interim secretary of state is earning more money than if he were the actual secretary of state. It's not that this is factually incorrect - Dennis C. Schnepfe, a career state employee, earns about $16,000 more per year than the secretary of state is due under law - but the consequences of this seem entirely unremarkable. Mr. O'Malley is expected to announce his selection for the Cabinet post in a matter of weeks, and insiders say the secretary will earn exactly what the law allows.

With friends like this Diplomacy was never his strong suit, but President Bush has finally realized it's a job somebody's got to do. Tucked into his 2009 budget is funding to hire nearly 1,100 diplomats. They should help replenish the depleted ranks of the State Department overseas. Mr. Bush's decision likely had more to do with friendship than fortifying the U.S. diplomatic mission - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made several calls on a White House budget appeals committee to plead for expanding the diplomatic corps.

ANNAPOLIS - The state capital attracted the usual suspects - lawmakers and lobbyists - this fall to tackle Maryland's deficit woes. But the real arm-twisting there occurred in the run-up to the special Mideast peace conference at the Naval Academy, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice persuaded various Arab heads of state to attend the Mideast summit and support renewed talks between Israel and the Palestinians. BUPE - It's not a magic potion or a sure-fire cure for addiction to heroin or prescription painkillers, but buprenorphine is still a promising antidote.

Maryland's secretary of state on Thursday ordered the National Organization of Deputy Sheriffs to immediately stop all fundraising in the state, contending that the North Carolina-based organization has committed nine violations of state charity regulations. According to the state, violations include misleading potential contributors, implying that the state has endorsed the organization, using unregistered professional solicitors, submitting false statements to the state and misrepresenting the reasons why funds are being solicited.

Retailers aren't the only ones counting on your holiday spirit to put them in the black. So are charities. Half of all the individual donations from Americans each year are made in the handful of weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, Charity Navigator says. Thank the combination of general good will toward man, holiday bonuses and the end-of-year deadline for tax deductions. Charities, squeezed by rising costs and greater competition for government grants, are more eager than ever to get your support.