Editorials.

The article focuses on several issues related to politics in the United States. The U.S. Senate's passage of McCain-Feingold was welcome if only as a comeuppance to senators Trent Lotts and Mitch McConnells who had arrogantly defied popular sentiment by keeping the bill under wraps for six years. There were several factors that made the time right for McFein, including a strategic calculation by the parties that they had reached soft-money parity, but paramount among them was the prevailing climate of popular disgust with the sale of the government to the highest bidder. The arrest in France of James Kopp, the accused assassin of Buffalo, New York obstetrician Barnett Slepian, could not have come at a more awkward time for the U.S. Government. U.S. President George W. Bush inaugurates himself by blocking aid to international family planning agencies and by nominating antiabortion fanatics to run the U.S. Justice Department. Then fugitive Kopp surfaces to remind the American public of where these bottom-line commitments lead.