Friday, April 27, 2001 1:39 P.M. EDT

Powell Praises Castro
George W. Bush won Florida last year, but just barely. His secretary of state seems determined to make things tough for him in the Sunshine State in 2004. Testifying before Congress, Colin Powell says Fidel Castro has "done some good things for his people." National Review's Jay Nordlinger answers Powell's "alarming and repugnant" remarks, citing a 1986 Harvard speech by Cuban dissident Armando Valladares:

After Valladares's speech, the students came after him: Hadn't Castro "done some good things for his people"? . . . They echoed the standard propaganda line, learned from their teachers, the New York Times, and so on.

Valladares gave an answer I will never forget. He said it gently, earnestly, yearning for the students to understand. I will paraphrase it: Say all those things are true. They're not, but just say they are. Can't you have those things without torturing people? Can't you have them without wrongly imprisoning them? Can't you have them without killing them? Without denying them rights? Without forbidding them to speak freely, without forbidding them to worship, without forbidding them to vote and have a normal political life and pursue their own destinies, and so on? Why is material well-being--not that Cuba has it, or anything remotely like it--but why is material well-being incompatible with freedom? Or not even with freedom: with the absence of a stifling, horrid dictatorship? Why?

'Living For Love'
Denise Rich, the songstress, Democratic donor, immunity recipient and ex-wife of Marc Rich, sits for an interview with Barbara Walters. Denise acknowledges that her money helped win her access to Bill Clinton, but denies that their fiscal relationship turned into a physical one. "I never had a sexual relationship or anything that's improper, any kind of relationship that would be improper with President Clinton." (Two months ago the National Enquirer published a report, which the mainstream press scrupulously ignored, claiming Denise and Bill had been an item.)

Denise also says she doesn't understand what it was her ex-husband was charged with. "To this day, I don't really know what he's done and what he hasn't done." That didn't stop her from declaring, in a letter lobbying Clinton for a pardon: "Marc is not a criminal." But the Washington Post's Lloyd Grove, reporting on a forthcoming Vanity Fair profile, says Denise got legal advice from highly placed sources: "Rich, who believes in reincarnation, claims that her late daughter Gabrielle, who died of leukemia at age 27, was 'whispering in her ear from on high' to lobby for Marc Rich's pardon."

The New York Daily News reports that at the end of the interview, Denise started singing one of her songs, "Living for Love," which she said described her life now. "I may be broke down, tore down, wore down, beat down, messed up, fed up, but I still get up, living for love."

According to the New York Post, Bill Clinton isn't the only political has-been Denise "showered with bucks. She also was generous with Mikhail Gorbachev." The Post's Page Six reports she showed up Wednesday to the Global Green Gala at the Rainbow Room, and the erstwhile commie's handlers tried to stop her from approaching him. But they let her through when Gorbachev shouted in Russian: "She has supported the cause! You are my friend!" He then proceeded to give Denise a "bear hug."

In other Clinton news, Pardongate prosecutors have canceled Roger Clinton's date with a grand jury, which suggests the ex-president's half-brother invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Marc Rich lobbyist Jack Quinn has testified before the grand jury for a third time. The Norway Post reports Bill Clinton will pocket 1.3 million Norwegian kroner (nearly $145,000) for a speech in Oslo next month. And Clinton's wife, the junior senator from New York, won't attend lunch at the White House on Monday in honor of President Bush's first hundred days.

Health Care for the Dead, Junkets for the Living
Federal AIDS funding has turning into a fraud-ridden boondoogle, The Washington Monthly reports in a cover story. "Lawmakers and the administration have done little to ensure that the money actually helps patients. Lax oversight of federal AIDS programs has permitted a rash of abuses from San Francisco to San Juan. While the money keeps rolling in to bloated nonprofit and government AIDS agencies, many patients continue to suffer with low-quality care, or no services at all," the monthly reports. Federal AIDS funds in Puerto Rico were used to pay for jet skis and for the personal maid of a physician, the magazine says.

Meanwhile, in Texas, "a county audit of the former Margaret K. Wright Clinic discovered that shopping sprees to Neiman Marcus, home appliances, and psychic phone-line calls had all been billed to the Ryan White CARE Act." What's more, "AIDS has spawned a rash of conferences that are little more than taxpayer-financed vacation junkets." East Coast AIDS activists refer to the annual AIDS Update Conference in San Francisco as "spring break." The Washington Post last year exposed an AIDS "conference" held in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, at the Marriott Frenchman's Reef Resort Hotel. It gets worse:

Since 1990, Ryan White funds have been distributed according to a complicated formula that counts the cumulative number of AIDS cases within a jurisdiction, not the current number of living clients. As a result, San Francisco, which experienced a devastating death toll early in the epidemic, still receives twice the funds, per patient ($5,980), than other cities with a comparable caseload such as Chicago ($3,123) and the District of Columbia ($2,869), according to a General Accounting Office (GAO) report last year. "The U.S. taxpayer has been funding health care services for dead people," said GAO Assistant Director Jerry Fastrup at last year's congressional hearing on the Ryan White CARE Act.

The author of the article should know of what he speaks. He is Wayne Turner, a co-founder of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

'Go Out and Get That Policeman'
A professor at Northern Kentucky University is "calling for the family of Timothy Thomas to stalk a Cincinnati police officer and 'take him out,' " the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. Clinton Hewan's comments came during a "student forum":

Wednesday's issue of the Northerner, NKU's weekly student newspaper, quotes Mr. Hewan as saying: "I do not advocate any violence as an (initiative). But in the case of willful murder, the family should go out and get that policeman."

He went on to say that, as an acceptable way to stand up for themselves, the Thomas family should "quietly stalk that S.O.B. and take him out." He was referring to police officer Steve Roach, accused of shooting Mr. Thomas as the unarmed 19-year-old ran from police on April 7.

Hewan says his statements were, in the Enquirer's words, "hypothetical and taken out of context." The Enquirer also reports Hewan "recently was named to the Wall of Tolerance, a monument under construction in Atlanta," and that in 1998 he won Northern Kentucky University's " 'Strongest Influence Award' for faculty." If this guy is influencing the whole faculty, we'll make sure we wear a bulletproof vest if we ever have to visit the NKU campus.

The Enquirer also reports that seven out of 10 adults arrested during rioting in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine area were from outside the neighborhood. The paper quotes prosecutor Mike Allen as saying, "I guess the word got out and people gathered and one thing led to another."

Plane Compromised
The Chinese have recovered large amounts of sensitive documents from the American surveillance plane that went down on Hainan Island, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz reports. "The classified documents include secret information on Chinese communications facilities and other targets of eavesdropping," the Times says, quoting intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Paul Greenberg writes, "Lest we forget, this incident is not yet closed. The People's Republic and Extortion Racket still holds an American plane."

Zero-Tolerance Watch
The Branchburg, N.J., school board is distancing itself from the ban on sign language imposed by J. Harry Westerholm, principal of the Stony Brook School. Westerholm had told the parents of 12-year-old Danica Lesko, who is hard of hearing, that she'd be suspended if she didn't stop signing on the bus. But now, the Newark Star-Ledger reports, "Superintendent Lois Capobianco said the district never banned sign language on its buses and that all students can sign as long as it does not become a safety problem. It would become an issue, Capobianco said, if students were getting out of their seats and using profanity." Watch it with that middle finger, kids.

Pro-Choice, Pro-Assault?
By a 252-172 vote, the House passes the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would make it a federal crime to harm or kill a fetus during any one of 68 crimes committed against a pregnant woman. The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League issues a typically hysterical press release quoting honcho Kate Michelman: "The Unborn Victims of Violence Act strikes at the very foundation of Roe v. Wade." In Michelman's view, it would seem, abortion is a matter between a woman and her attacker.

A Horowitz Copycat
David Mazel writes in Salon that, inspired by David Horowitz's free-speech campaign, he decided to see how tolerant student newspapers at conservative colleges would be. He prepared a provocative ad "proclaiming in bold letters that 1) abortion is not murder and 2) God is an abortionist," and submitted it to campus papers at 11 religious, military and traditional colleges. Result: It was rejected at 10 of them. Only the Hillsdale Collegian said it was willing to publish the ad.

"In an April 2 article in Salon, Horowitz wrote that his own ad had been accepted by 14 of 48 papers," Mazel writes. "His 29 percent acceptance rate is certainly nothing for the left to cheer about, but it sure beats my own paltry 9 percent."

We'll concede Mazel has a point in that some on the right are less than consistent in their devotion to free speech. But his comparison isn't really a fair one. After all, he selected a small group of colleges that are openly conservative in their views. Horowitz, in contrast, didn't send his ad to colleges with identifiably left-wing philosophies like New York's New School University. Rather, he targeted mainstream institutions of higher education, including many state universities. Intolerance of Mazel's liberal views is surely the exception rather than the rule in American higher education as a whole. We'd be happy if the same could be said of Horowitz's conservative ones.

No Taste for Freedom
Michael Kinsley reports on the American food critic, Ruth Reichl (editor of Gourmet magazine and erstwhile restaurant critic for the New York Times), who made a trip to China in 1980 and visited a chef who had been "re-educated" during the Cultural Revolution by being made to dig a lake by hand. Reichl was supposed to offer the man a chance to escape to America, but he ended up declining after she warned him: "I don't think that Americans are ready to appreciate your cooking. I'm not sure we would understand that shrimp peeled in ice water taste better."

Writes Kinsley: "It's hard to imagine a more spectacular example of no sensitivity at all to food's social context than the notion that someone should prefer life in China over America on the basis of how we peel shrimp."

An E-Male Hoax
The editor of the French Web site that started the story that Miss France, Elodie Gossuin, is a man now says it was a joke. "Everything is a joke on our page," L'Examineur editor Frederic Royer tells the Associated Press. "If [the report about Gossuin] comes from us, it's worrying and it's serious. That would mean that people do not understand humor."

(Thanks to George Cordes and Bill Siroty. If you have a tip for Best of the Web Today, e-mail us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)