“Nothing has frustrated me in this job. Absolutely nothing,” says Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, interviewed in Illinois Issues (March). “I’m in a great position. I don’t want to be a lifetime school superintendent. I don’t want to be an education consultant when I’m done here. I’m not setting the stage to run for political office. If I physically survive this job and accomplish what I hope to accomplish and what the mayor hopes to accomplish, then my ticket is written: I’m going to heaven. I can go back and become a normal person and try to raise my kids and spend time with my family. So I don’t have to play it safe.”
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High crimes and misdemeanors–no film at 10. “The stunning news from the LA Times that Chinese intelligence gave $300,000 to Johnny Chung to pass along to Clinton and the Democrats has received only the slightest attention from other media,” writes Sam Smith in “Progressive Review” (April 6). “It’s looking more and more as if the whole China spy-bribery story will be broaddricked (verb: the suppression of a major news story by major media).”
This week’s bad-timing award. The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations just issued a report, “American Public Opinion and U.S. Foreign Policy 1999,” based on a national survey taken late last year. Given a list of 13 possible “threats to U.S. vital interests,” the public ranked “regional ethnic conflicts” 11th, tied with “the military power of Russia.” Just 34 percent of those polled thought that conflicts such as the one in Kosovo were “critical threats” to the U.S., ranking them well behind international terrorism, chemical and biological weapons, unfriendly nuclear powers, AIDS and other potential epidemics, and China’s becoming a world power.
