Inside Politics

Frist vs. Daschle

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, will travel to South Dakota next month to campaign against his Democratic counterpart, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, Roll Call reports.

Mr. Daschle is up against his toughest opponent since joining the Senate in 1986 — former Rep. John Thune. Mr. Thune won statewide election in South Dakota as the state’s only representative in the House for three terms before retiring to run for the Senate four years ago. In that race against the state’s junior senator, Tim Johnson, he lost by 518 votes amid accusations of election fraud on the state’s Indian reservations.

A spokesman for Mr. Daschle said he welcomes Mr. Frist and plans to lobby him on matters of local interest, such as country-of-origin labeling for meat.

Senate historian Richard Baker told Roll Call that he could not recall a time in the modern era of campaigns when one floor leader campaigned against the other in his home state. But that is mostly because Mr. Daschle is the first floor leader since the 1960s to face a tough re-election fight, he added.

Gorelick’s history

Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick is a member of the September 11 commission, but she should be sitting on the witness stand, Ethan Wallison writes in National Review Online.

Today, former Attorney General Janet Reno, “under whom Gorelick served for three years beginning in 1994, testifies in open session,” said Mr. Wallison, who covers the White House for Roll Call.

“The questioning can reasonably be expected to focus on steps taken (or not taken) at the Justice Department in the wake of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — the worst incidents of terrorism inside the United States before the September 11 hijackings.

“Shouldn’t Gorelick provide the commission — and the public — with answers on these topics as well? There is something absurd about the notion that, rather than testifying, Gorelick will instead be asking Reno for information. Are there any questions she can ask to which she does not already have the answer? Gorelick’s role with the commission deprives the inquiry of a potentially valuable source of agreement or disagreement with the attorney general’s testimony.

“Consider one theme that has emerged from the hearings to date: the hapless condition of the FBI’s antiterror efforts before the 9/11 attacks. If the attacks in New York and Oklahoma City amounted to failures for the FBI, what steps did Gorelick and other top officials at Justice, of which the agency is a part, take to defend against the next instance?”

Serving waffles

“Some jokers who don’t like the Democratic presidential candidate are trying to make his campaign Web site, johnkerry.com, the first answer to a search of the word ’waffles’ on Google, the No. 1 Internet search engine,” USA Today reports.

“They’ve nearly succeeded on the No. 2 search engine, Yahoo. By Sunday, eight days after the prank began, johnkerry.com was listed second among 703,000 results of a Yahoo search of the word ’waffles,’” reporter Mark Mammott said.

“At the No. 3 search engine, MSN Search, johnkerry.com was also the second Web page result of a search Sunday for “waffles.”

On Google, johnkerry.com was not in the top 1,000 of the 556,000 results of a search for “waffles.”

“Authorities on search engines say the joke’s quick impact on Yahoo and MSN, though, is a sign that the campaign is working and that Google will be affected soon.

“The high-tech twist on old-fashioned political chicanery follows an Internet prank last year that still tweaks President Bush. Anti-Bush practical jokers made Bush’s official biography at whitehouse.gov the first result of a Google search of the phrase ’miserable failure.’

“Equally clever Bush supporters came to his defense. They’ve made his biography the No. 1 result of a Google search for ’great president.’

“Web-savvy jokers call a scheme to push Internet users to a specific Web site ’Google bombing.’ It takes a coordinated effort by many Web sites and blogs. ’Blog’ is short for Web log, a kind of online diary.”

State of shock

Jamiel Terry, the 24-year-old adopted son of Randall A. Terry, militant abortion protester and opponent of same-sex “marriage,” acknowledges he is a homosexual in the May issue of Out magazine, slated to reach newsstands April 20.

“I recently moved to Charlotte, N.C., to attend school at my university’s new campus here. I met a wonderful guy who is everything I have ever desired,” the younger Terry writes in a commentary titled “Voices: A Rising Son” obtained by The Washington Times.

In an interview, Randall Terry said his son first told him he was a homosexual two years ago, but that he is “in a state of shock” about the article in Out and the $5,000 payment Jamiel told him he received for writing it.

The elder Mr. Terry said he did not bar Jamiel from his home after learning of his homosexuality. But his son is not welcome there now, “because he betrayed our family’s privacy … and he could sell us out again.”

“He knows he is going to get his 15 minutes of fame because he’s the son of a high-profile Christian leader who has fought against homosexual ’marriage,’” said Mr. Terry, who led the antiabortion group Operation Rescue in the 1980s and is now a radio talk-show host in Florida.

Kerry vs. Halliburton

“John Kerry loves to vilify Halliburton,” James Taranto writes in his Best of the Web Today column at www.OpinionJournal.com.

“In a December 2003 press release, the candidate blasted the company over an alleged fuel overcharge, which remains under investigation by the Pentagon. Kerry waxed indignant about how the $61 million Halliburton putatively overcharged could have been used to buy 40,000 sets of body armor for soldiers — this two months after he voted against funding the war and reconstruction efforts,” Mr. Taranto said.

One thing Mr. Kerry does not mention is “the risks that these contractors are taking to help stabilize and reconstruct Iraq.”

“It takes nothing away from America’s soldiers and Marines to acknowledge that private-sector workers are putting their lives on the line, too.”

Seven employees of the American construction and engineering company Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, are unaccounted for in Iraq.

The exact words

Paula Jones, whose sexual-harassment lawsuit led to the impeachment of President Clinton, is trying to interest publishers in a book, the New York Post reports.

When Mr. Clinton looked into the camera and said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” those were “the precise words Paula had wanted him to tell the world about her,” the book proposal says.

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.