AMERICA: Not for nothing is Tom DeLay known as the "Hammer". The tobacco-chewing majority leader of the US House of Representatives has imposed his red-blooded Texan conservatism on all kinds of House legislation. Only this week he infuriated liberals by announcing he would let the ban on assault weapons expire next year.
But the "Hammer" may have overreached himself by his interference in the political drama being played out in his home state. In Texas some 50 Democrats fled to Oklahoma to deny Republicans the quorum they needed to pass a redistricting law that could send seven new Republican congressmen to Washington. The proposed legislation was a power play by DeLay in collusion with Republican leaders who control Texas. DeLay's political director, Jim Ellis, even brought fresh redistricting maps to a committee meeting in the capital, Austin.
The Democrats were infuriated - the redistricting was not due for another eight years - and they did a runner. One Democrat, James Laney, took off in his private plane. Under Texas law they could all be forcibly brought back to the State House, and the Republicans instructed the Texas Rangers to find them.
Now it has emerged that they used the Department of Homeland Security to locate the aircraft. Texas officials told the department's tracking station in California that the plane was missing and a full-scale alert got under way. Homeland Security officials were furious when the Fort Worth Star-Telegram exposed this misuse of federal anti-terrorism resources. In the end the Democrats, who had camped out at a Holiday Inn, declared victory and went home, after the bill lapsed at midnight on Thursday.
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While this was going on, another more obscure southern Republican was being honoured in an unlikely place, the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, where on Monday he received one of the annual JFK Profile in Courage Awards.
He was former Georgia state Congressman Dan Ponder. The award was for a speech he made in the Georgia state house on a hate-crimes bill that seemed doomed to fail. It so impressed one of the judges, commentator Al Hunt, that he reprinted the speech in his Wall Street Journal column.
Ponder started by saying he was the last person to speak up for the legislation. He was a white Republican with slave-owning great-great grandfathers that fought for the Confederacy. He was raised in a conservative Baptist church and educated in a mostly white university. One woman in his life had, however, made a huge difference, a black servant called Mary Ward who came to cook breakfast and lunch and wash their clothes.
"But she was much more than that. She read books to me. When I was playing Little League she would go out and catch ball with me. She was never, ever afraid to discipline me or spank me. She expected the absolute best out of me, perhaps, and I am sure, even more than she did her own children.
"One day, when I was about 12 or 13 I was leaving for school. As I was walking out the door she turned to kiss me goodbye. And for some reason, I turned my head. She stopped me and she looked into my eyes with a look that absolutely burns in my memory right now and she said, 'You didn't kiss me because I am black.' At that instant, Ponder said, he knew she was right. He denied it but at that age was forced to confront a small, dark part of himself. Mary Ward had loved him unconditionally and had been a second mother to him, but wasn't worthy of a goodbye kiss simply because of the colour of her skin. Hate was all around, he said, taking shape sometimes in small, unrecognised ways.
"I have lived with the shame and memory of my betrayal of Mary Ward's love for me," he concluded. "I pledged to myself then and I re-pledged to myself the day I buried her that never, ever again would I look in the mirror and know that I had kept silent, and let hate or prejudice or indifference negatively impact a person's life."
Hate crimes, whether against blacks, gays or Jews, were about sending a message, he said, and they must send a message that Georgia had no room for hatred within its borders.
When he finished the chamber erupted in applause and the House passed the bill. Senator Edward Kennedy said, "It's one of the all-time great political speeches and I hope everyone who hears about it will read it."
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President Kennedy was himself back on the front pages when the New York Daily News on Monday informed its readers "JFK HAD A MONICA". The information that Kennedy had an affair with a 19-year-old intern called Mimi came from an unsealed oral history by former White House aide Barbara Gamarekian, used by historian Robert Dallek in a new Kennedy book.
The Daily News outed Mimi three days later. She is Marion (Mimi) Fahnestock, now 60 and a grandmother of four, who works as a church administrator in Manhattan. It was all true, she said, and it was in fact a huge weight off her shoulders to be able to tell her family a secret she had kept for 41 years.
The affair began in 1962 after Mimi was taken on as an intern. The teenager was sometimes flown on Air Force jets to secret liaisons with President Kennedy at summit meetings, Ms Gamarekian revealed. Mimi had no typing ability and Dallek reckoned her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on his trips. Once she was found hiding in a limousine in the president's entourage in the Bahamas.
When Mimi stayed behind during JFK's trip to Ireland in June 1963 she called Kennedy in tears to complain that she had been forced to work on a Friday. "The President was just furious," Gamarekian said. "He was ready to fire someone."
The oral history, recorded in 1994, also recounts how Jackie Kennedy was showing a French journalist around the White House when they came across an aide called Priscilla. Speaking in French, she told the shocked reporter, "This is the girl who is supposedly sleeping with my husband."
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The presidential election campaign is well under way, but there is bad news for the nine declared Democratic candidates. A CBS poll shows only one in three Americans could name any of them. Those who could plumped for Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. Democrats meeting in Washington on Thursday called in Bill Clinton for advice. Bush can be beaten, he told them, just as he defeated the senior George Bush in 1992 after the first Gulf War, but this time, Clinton warned, the Democratic challenger will have to match Bush on the one issue for which he is popular - national security and the war on terrorism.
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One thing the Democrats are up against is the brilliant use of imagery by the White House. Nevertheless, the Bush handlers are in danger, to use an old adage, of being so sharp they will cut themselves. The end-of-war landing by President Bush on an aircraft carrier where he posed in a jump- suit with pilots was great stagecraft, but many saw it as a pre-election stunt.
Now another piece of trickery has come to light. In Indianapolis, where Mr Bush was making a speech on tax cuts - which critics say favour the rich - local TV showed a prominent Republican wearing a tie before the speech, tieless as he shook hands with Mr Bush, then wearing a tie again afterwards.
Before he spoke, it turned out, Bush aides had asked men sitting behind President Bush to remove their ties so they would look more like ordinary, rather than rich, Americans. "When the guy from the White House tells you to take your tie off, you don't ask why," one said.