Kenosha News from Kenosha, Wisconsin • 7

Commentary TUESDAY JANUARY 13 1998 KENOSHA NEWS A7 Kreuser receives positive feedback from Capitol floor leadership post Whafs being said? Kreuser is an effective legislator a quick study who knows how to get things done adept at communicating and striking compromise with fellow legislators Since saying it doesn't make it necessarily so we asked around (Kreuser) is one of the real stars of the future" said Rep Marlin Schneider D-Wisconsin Rapids assistant Assembly minority leader a very bright guy lie chooses his issues carefully Works very well with other legislators and state agencies Doesn't shoot his mouth off" Partly in jest Schneider adds he fights too darn hard for his district The guys you elect in middle of his second term But not for Kreuser who is candid about his goals "This is why here (in the Assembly)" Kreuser said ant to move up the ladder gain influence and do more for my district planned a career in elective politics a long time ago and part of the process is advancing yourself one step at a time hat it's all about" Being involved in student government at the University of Wisconsin Parkside working as an intern with County Executive John Collins while attending paduate school and then serving as full-time administrative assistant to Collins from 1986 to Kenosha are always looking for something to take back home" Senate Majority Leader Chuck Chvala D-Madison said Kreuser is to be a leader He's only a breath away from the top of the Assembly worked with Jim on a couple of bills He does his homework and gets around to talk to people more so than most of his Assembly colleagues" Chvala quickly adds not surprised at performance For years Kenosha has had a tradition of sending good people to the Legislature Molinaro Andrea Antaramiari just one of the latest in the string" Could be pretty heady stuff for a 36-year-oid politician in the The correspondence said: 'I feel that this 2 percent cut will make agencies think about their functions and will make the employees they do have do hat is expected of them their It goes on to urge departments to closely scrutinize their manpower needs and make sure that those in supervisory positions are using support staff to get basic sen ice work done for taxpayers not to shovel their personal orkload on others The letter is anonymously signed Porter considers it a compliment reduction ill save Wisconsin taxpayers $12 million over the next two years" he said 1993 were excellent training grounds Kreuser said "During those years I got to know a lot of people in Madison" he lot of people After my election to the Assembly I was able to hit the ground running" State Rep Cloyd Porter R-Burlington whose district includes part of Kenosha County and his fellow members of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee got an interesting piece of mail from an unidentified state employee last week The letter was about the bipartisan decision last year by the committee and Gov Tommy Thompson to enact a two-year 2 percent across-the-board spending cut for all state agencies is a meaty BOSTON I may not be a true First Amendment absolutist I mean after seeing pictures of the vacationing Clintons I could imagine banning photographers from shooting any woman over 40 in a bathing suit Still it never occurred to me that I could be sued for libeling a lettuce or maligning a melon This is pretty much happening to talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and talk-show guest Howard Lyman On Jan 20 they will go on trial in Amarillo Texas for disparaging hamburger In the spring of 1996 Lyman a vegetarian and Humane Society official took part in an Oprah show on mad cow disease Lyman took on the practice of grinding up dead cows and feeding them to live cows only one of them has mad cow he said has the potential to Infect thousands" In response to this cheery thought Oprah blurted out: has just stopped me from eating another burger!" At that exact moment Paul Engler an Amarillo cattle feedlot operator visiting In Chicago went bananas if that slandering bananas When the price of beef dropped he and others in the Texas cattle industry decided to sue Oprah the woman the show the guest for $67 million Now on the surface this sounds pretty fruity if that Isn't maligning fruit But in the wake of the Alar-in-apples scare when consumers dropped apples like hot potatoes Texas and 12 other states passed new laws prohibiting false disparagement of perishable food Such laws to protect the reputation of carrots and spinach were Immediately nicknamed veggie libel laws" or "the veggie hate laws" Quite frankly they flunked my giggle test But the very fact that this case asn't thrown out that the law is having its first big expensive test is enough to make anyone said a nasty word about meat feel downright cowed Mind you the cattlemen don't have a very good beef against Oprah First of all in order to in they must prove that statements on the show were false lawsuit case In raising the specter of mad cow disease in America Lyman was speculating about what could happen not hat was happening More to the point his concern about feed was seconded by the government which just banned the fairly disgusting culinary habit of serving dead cow to live ones Secondly they must prove that Lyman and Oprah knew or should have known that they were making false statements And they have to convince a jury that her crack about burgers as of a different dimension than the comments millions of us have made about junk food: stuff's going to kill you" Even if they do all that the cattle folk still have to prove that the Oprah show ruined the market Oprah may sell books But does she run the commodities market? The reason this case is hard to stomach is not because the cattle moguls might win It's because win or lose they might scare off the next news bulletin As Emory Law Professor David Bederman a lover of both hamburgers and the First Amendment says laws were intended to stifle speech" A nervous agribusiness wants to make media outlets think twice about legal costs Bederman who has been informally tracking this chilling effect in veggie hate-law states believes "A lot of stories are being Some of the most important investigative work over the past century has been about food safety Today in another wave of worries about everything from imported strawberries to fast food coli to cancer-causing chemicals I understand fears of fear mon-gering and alarms about false alarms But sometimes the choice is between a stifled alarm and an occasional false alarm The Texas veggie libel law demands a level of scientific proof that would have stifled early debate about tobacco If Oprah can't say what she thinks can scientists speculate out loud about the first signs of trouble? Can a newspaper report what they say? The most bizarre part of the new veggie libel laws is that in 13 states it's now become easier for a persimmon to sue than for a public person That's not just unconstitutional it's nuts No offense of course to the nuts OIfl Goodman a columnist for Thr Bosum Viftbe Flattering gossip and news media speculation have periodically swirled around state Rep Jim Kreuser in recent months The upshot of all the talk is that the Kenosha Democrat has a promising career ahead of him at the Capitol assuming he can hold on to his apparently secure Assembly seat Translate promising career into a key committee chairmanship or a Indonesian economy runs on cronyism THE WASHINGTON POST The constantly moving epicenter of the seemingly unending Asian financial crisis has now ihoved back to Indonesia In South Korea conditions have stabilized at least for now government is making an earnest effort at reform But in Indonesia the world's fourth most populous nation the situation goes from bad to worse This is due partly to the wrong medicine being prescribed from outside partly to failure to implement necessary reforms and very largely to the same Shortcoming that helped bring dn the crisis in the first place: an absence of democratic accountability crisis began last year In October it reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fmd to restructure its economy in exchange for I billions of dollars of emergency lpans But last Tuesday its cur-' rency and stock market went back into a tailspin after President Suharto released a proposed fiscal budget that according to the judgment of outside investors was profligate unrealistic and in violation of the agreed-upon IMF reform plan This Judgment was to a large extent unfair The proposed budget actually was in balance Despite terrible inflation now Wracking Indonesia the government proposed almost no pay raise for the tfivil service For a quarter-century now Indonesia has done an admirable job of balancing its budget hile reducing poverty in its country Unfortunately any defense Indonesia might have presented to the world of its fiscal soundness was undermined by Mr Suharto's apparent lack of seriousness in tackling the root causes of his nation's financial problems Indonesia during his 33-year tenure has compiled an admirable record of economic growth but in recent years that growth has been increasingly tarnished by cronyism and corruption Children and friends of the president have amassed wealth often from state-sponsored projects But Mr Suharto wavered when it came to shutting down a son's failing bank He showed no inclination to pull the plug on wasteful and expensive state-sponsored projects such as one to develop a which benefit a narrow circle but hurt the economy as a whole There has been far too little commitment to moving from an economy of favors and influence to an open system ruled by impartial law Most of all investors have ihoved out of Indonesia because of fear of political turmoil Mr ISuharto 76 has had health problems no one knows how serious and he has done nothing to prepare for an orderly transition On the contrary he has done everything possible to quash those civic institutions that might have eased the way to a more democratic post Suharto era In a nation that has weathered only one change of power Kince independence and that one a bloody episode that claimed as many as 500000 lives this is no small failing An absence of any checks on presidential pow er the absence of a free press an independent legislature a true opposition party allowed crony capitalism to nourish Now it impedes the political and economic reform Indonesia desperately needs to stem the current panic Cartoon Sampler had been executed for a slaying Christie committed not only became the basis of a famous movie Rillington Place" but was am mg the reasons Britain in 1973 abolished the death penalty for crimes including murder In the meantime the United States has kept up a steady pace of executions all the while agonizing over whether the state should be in the business of putting people to death The discomfort level swells periodically as is happening now with the scheduled Feb 3 execution in Texas of Karla Faye Tucker There's no doubt of her guilt Tucker admitted statbing two people to death ith a pickax but a petite pretty woman who claims to have gotten religion in the intervening 15 years The debate over the Tucker case and the death penalty re minds us that the United States is in some fairly sleazy company when it comes to nations that actively prariiee capital punish Executions put United States in bad company BTSUVU TATUM MAKTW ST PETERSBURG T'VCS In 1949 Beryl Evans and her infant daughter were found strangled in a grimy working-class section of north London Evans' husband a truck driver of low IQ confessed recanted but was 'convicted anyway partly on the testimony of his downstairs neighbor John Christie Evans was sentenced to death and quickly hanged The matter might have ended there had not the building owner's later made a gruesome discovery in the kitchen and garden of apartment were the remains of six women including Christie's missing wife The former reserve police officer turned out to be one of the most horrific serial killers in modem British history He confessed to murdering seven women Beryl Evans among them and went to the gallows himself The idea that an innoemt ment: Algeria Iraq Nigeria Cuba Pakistan Russia And of course China which is thought to have executed almost 4500 people in 1996 alone Moreover the United States is among just a handful of nations since 1990 that have put people to death for crimes they committed as juveniles With the borrors of World War II and the Holocaust still fresh in memory West Germany in 1949 became the first major country to ban capital punishment for all crimes The action came just a year after the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose Article 5 proclaims that one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" It is this clause that Amnesty International and others cite in their push fr worldwide abolition of the ultimate punishment death The campaign has had some success in recent years an average of two nations a year have abolished the death penalty The latest were Poland (last July) and the former Soviet republic of Georgia (in November) Altogether 69 countries have a total ban on executions Among this group are Canada France Italy Ireland Australia and the Scandinav ian countries Another 14 nations including Mexico and South Africa bar capital punishment for crimes Britain has not executed anyone since 1964 but retains the death penalty for trea son certain other crimes against the state and the murder of the king or queen Israel's one and only execution came in 1962 when it hanged Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmarn for his role in killing 6 million Jew A third category consists of facto abolitionists" 26 countries that keep the death penalty on their bocks but haven't executed anyone in at least 10 years These include Albania Turkey Congo and the Philippines (w hich interest ingly enough put its electric chair in a museum only to have the building struck by lightning) Which brings us to the fourth and largest category retent lon-ist Of the 93 countries that still use the death penalty for even ordinary crimes the United States is the only one in North America and among the few in the Western world Last year we executed 74 people half of them in Texas alone So how do the retentionists dispatch their worst criminals? In Iran and South Korea it's hanging In China it's the firing squad And in the United States it's both of the above plus the electric chair gas chamber and lethal injection We have more ways of legally killing people than any place el-e in the world.