The testimony grew heated at times, with Bloomberg calling out Congress for failing to fix the country's broken immigration system.

Rep. Steve King, an anti-immigrant Republican congressman from Iowa, called out the mayor for citing statistics which King claimed contradicted other analyses. King asked Bloomberg where he got his data from.

"The study is what goes on every day in New York City," Bloomberg said, and referencing the man sitting next to him he continued, "Rupert and I together employ about 75,000 people so we know a little bit about job creation."

The mayor said that 40 percent of New York's 8.4 million people were immigrants, and he said that even the 500,000 undocumented immigrants who live in the city are a net benefit, since 75 percent of them pay social security taxes but do not get the benefits of the program, and since most of them are single and without children they can add to the economy without draining resources.

And Texas congressman Ted Poe, who once compared illegal immigrants to grasshoppers, made the case for border security and said that 67 percent of the children born at LBJ Hospital in Houston were born to mothers that were illegal immigrants.

"What frustrates the American public," the mayor shot back, citing polls, "Is that we can't understand why you guys complain about immigrants coming over the border illegally and then don't do anything about it."

The mayor said that he believed in border security, but said that more visas must be granted to highly skilled immigrants since American companies are hungry for those kinds of employees.

The other moment of note in the hearing was when Congressman Anthony Weiner, the mayor's one-time opponent, threw him a softball about America losing its edge if it came to be seen as an unwelcoming place.

The mayor briefly answered Weiner's question, and then broke with protocol somewhat by addressing Weiner by his first name and answering another committee member's question.

"There is a great danger that we will lose the reputation as the land of the free and the home of the brave," he said. "And Congresswoman Sanchez, let me just address one thing, I know it's on Anthony's time..."

Full video here

Here was Senator Edward Kennedy, taking the stage as a two-man band struck up “The Boys of Wexford,” promising comprehensive immigration legislation that would offer “illegals” a path to citizenship.

“I didn’t come here to lose!” Mr. Kennedy boomed, sweat coursing down the side of his face.

Here was Senator Hillary Clinton, declaring that she was “waiting to fall in behind our leader, Senator Kennedy, and the rest of us who are in his army are going to send the message through Congress.”

And here was Senator Charles Schumer, delighting the crowd as he spurred them into an I.R.A.-associated chant of “Tiocfaidh Ar La”—“Our Day Will Come.”

The event, held one week ago under the auspices of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, seemed like a testament to the unique leverage on the body politic that Irish-Americans have traditionally enjoyed.

Saturday’s St. Patrick’s Day parades across the nation—the biggest, in New York City, is expected to attract two million marchers and onlookers—will doubtless also be proclaimed as affirmations of Irish America’s vitality.

Beyond the bombast, however, the picture looks very different. The immigration debate, far from demonstrating the enduring strength of Irish America, may in fact represent the Irish lobby’s last hurrah. Even some of Irish America’s most committed advocates already lament the erosion of their community’s power.

“It is declining,” said Niall O’Dowd, publisher of the New York–based Irish Voice newspaper and a founder of the ILIR. “Our heroes are not getting any younger. Ted Kennedy is 75. Where is the next generation of Irish community leaders?”

The core of the problem is that both strands of the so-called Irish lobby—the first comprised of Americans of Irish heritage, the second of recently arrived Irish immigrants—are beginning to fray.

Irish-Americans have, for years, become more integrated with—and indistinguishable from—mainstream American society. As their geographical ties to Irish communities have loosened, so too have their political allegiances.

“Is there really a sense of Irish-American-ness when it comes to voting?” Baruch College political-science professor Doug Muzzio asked rhetorically. “I would imagine that the only time a lot of those people consciously think of themselves as Irish is when they drink to excess” on St. Patrick’s Day.

“The old-style Irish-American politician is not quite a thing of the past,” New York political consultant George Arzt said. “But it’s not like the old days, when a balanced ticket meant someone Irish, someone Italian and someone Jewish.”

Meanwhile, economic boom times in Ireland—the much-vaunted “Celtic Tiger”—and more rigorous immigration enforcement by U.S. authorities since Sept. 11 have stanched the flow of new arrivals.

Though reliable statistics are by their nature difficult to come by, a visit to any of the old Irish redoubts in New York—Woodside, Sunnyside and Maspeth in Queens, or Woodlawn in the Bronx—provides plenty of evidence that their ethnic makeup is changing.

And the anecdotal evidence is stark. New York’s Gaelic Athletic Association, which has long functioned as a community network as much as a sporting organization, is seeing its teams disband and numbers shrink.

“I am absolutely certain that within five years, the G.A.A. to all intents and purposes will be dead in New York, which I think will be a dreadful situation,” Mr. O’Dowd said.

Yet another factor that has affected Irish America in recent years—one amounting to a silver lining containing a cloud—is the end of “the Troubles.” In times past, the armed conflict in the North of Ireland was a potent rallying point for activists, be they Irish nationals or Irish-Americans. Now that peace reigns, however uneasily, on the streets of Belfast, that issue has lost much of its potency.

All of these factors accrete into a straightforward loss of Irish-American political influence.

“It used to be that you’d be lucky if you could throw a stone in New York and not hit an Irish politician,” said Queens Congressman Joseph Crowley, who also spoke at the immigration rally in Washington. “There was Delaney, Murphy, Rooney, Moynihan. Now I am the only Irish-American Democratic Congressman from New York.”

The immigration issue has arguably gotten so much attention recently from Irish-Americans not just on the merits, but for an important tactical reason: It has served to draw together Irish activists of differing hues once more into one cohesive force.

It also self-evidently lends itself to grassroots involvement. Ciaran Staunton, the vice chairman of the immigration-reform group and a Manhattan bar owner, told the Washington meeting that the organization had grown to 28,000 members since its inception in late 2005. The rally was the culmination of a day that saw about 3,000 activists from around the country pound the corridors of Capitol Hill to make their case.

Acknowledging that Irish America can still punch “hugely” above its weight, and that “you just had to be there in that room to see that,” Mr. O’Dowd also noted that “this is probably the first grassroots Irish issue since the North was at its height that Irish-Americans are keenly interested in.”

Estimates of the total number of Irish illegal immigrants in the U.S. vary from 20,000 to over 50,000. Either way, they are a small proportion of the estimated 12 million “illegals” in the nation as a whole.

But, as Mr. Crowley noted, the Irish “bring a history of organizational strength and a sense of community” to the debate. In the process, they have created a template that other ethnicities seem to want to follow.

Mr. Staunton recalled a recent meeting between Irish immigration advocates and representatives of an unnamed Asian-American newspaper.

“They have a readership of 400,000,” he said with some awe. “They have thousands and thousands of undocumented people. And our advice to them was, ‘Get them onto the streets. You have to show that you’re out there.’ We’ve got all these people and they are empowered.”

An old joke holds that the first item on the agenda of any Irish political organization is the inevitable split. While the ILIR has maintained a united front so far, its stance has alienated Peter King, the Long Island Congressman once famous for his supportiveness toward Irish issues in general and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams in particular.

And the alienation runs both ways: Mr. King’s adamant opposition to any path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, Irish or otherwise, has led accusations of betrayal by his former allies.

“They have short memories,” Mr. King said. “I don’t think there was anybody at more political risk than I was as a result of engagement with Irish issues. I regularly visited with Sinn Fein; I hosted events for them long before it was fashionable. I would have thought that 25 years of work on Irish issues would count for something.”

Aside from disagreeing with the ILIR’s viewpoint, the Congressman expressed skepticism about the organization’s high-profile campaign. He contended that many people in the federal government did not even know that Irish “illegals” existed in any significant number until the lobbying effort began.

Such people were “under the radar,” Mr. King asserted, “until they started running around Capitol Hill in their green T-shirts.”

Though Mr. King insisted that Irish-Americans in his district were no less conservative on immigration than any other group, he also acknowledged that the work of the Irish lobby in general may improve the chances of Congress passing some form of liberalizing legislation.

“They are probably a plus, because it gets it away from the perception that this is just a Muslim and a Hispanic issue,” he said. “The Irish are considered mainstream by most Americans.”

Mr. King said, somewhat wistfully, that his former friends in what remains of the Irish lobby had become, functionally, just another narrowly focused interest group.

“This has become their issue now,” he said. “There is very little organizational effort on the North. All the effort is being put into immigration.”

As his Presidency enters its twilight years, Mr. Bush evidently wishes he could revisit the sunny days of “compassionate conservatism,” when gauzy proposals and happy talk so easily beguiled so many voters.

His problem is that we have heard all this before, and we know him too well by now.

Every year in his State of the Union address, he feigns deep concern over the same issues that he emphasized this year. He always urges independence from foreign oil, rapid development of alternative-energy sources, effective use of conservation and improvement of the environment. (Remember his “switch grass” biofuel program from last year?) He always promises more affordable health care that will become available to more of the uninsured and their children. He always says that public education must be made more effective and higher education should be made more affordable.

The chances are that few, if any, of the proposals advertised in his speech will actually arrive on Capitol Hill as legislation—or that he will even bother to mention them again, unless he recycles the same ideas next year. For most of these programs and promises are old half-measures, with little saliency and even less support. They are desperate cries for approval from a President who has permanently forfeited the popularity he once brandished like a weapon.

His bigger problem, of course, is that he still refuses to face the failure of his military and diplomatic policies in Iraq—and the rejection of his escalation plan even by members of his own party. He seems to believe that he can buy off or distract the burgeoning opposition to the Iraq debacle by promising to deal with other issues “that people care about,” as his flacks would say.

Today, however, there is no issue that people care about more than the war. And on the question of how to extricate us from the disaster that he and his administration have created, he simply has no credibility. Even leading figures in his own party, such as Senator John Warner (R.-Va.), are no longer willing to defend him. When he claims that his critics have no alternative to his military escalation, they should refer him to the best-selling Iraq Study Group report, which outlines a highly specific plan for reconciliation, amnesty and negotiated withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq—so that the war against Al Qaeda can be prosecuted more successfully.

In this moment, as in so many others since Mr. Bush first took the oath of office, his distinguishing characteristic is the squandered opportunity. After 9/11, he could have brought the country together, and instead decided to aggrandize his party and his own power. He could have brought the world together to confront civilization’s enemies, from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, and chose instead to ruin traditional alliances in an aggressive, illegal and unnecessary war.

Had he not made those stupid choices, and were he not blinded by his arrogance, then today he might be able to take advantage of crucial opportunities to improve the future of the United States and planet Earth.

At no time in recent years, for instance, has there been such broad consensus, in the business community as well as the labor movement, and among citizens of all political persuasions, that we must reform the American health-care system to contain costs and provide universal coverage. Both nationally and internationally, the same kind of consensus exists for strong measures to cope with global warming, as corporate executives sit down with environmental leaders.

Yet the health-care schemes floated by the President and his aides would achieve little except to damage the present system of employer coverage without building a viable replacement. That is why the advocates of universal care will scarcely bother to deconstruct the Bush plan, which was dead on arrival.

As for his energy proposals, they are too little and too late, coming from a President who has so reliably behaved like a stooge for the oil and coal interests. He has consistently opposed substantial fuel-economy standards, and the White House has even expressed opposition to the modest House legislation that cuts the ridiculous subsidies to the oil industry and redirects the funding to renewable energy.

When Mr. Bush was truly popular, the horizons for Presidential achievement seemed almost limitless. Now that he is truly scorned, his possibilities seem nil. How silly and how sad that he still expects us to believe him.

Ms. Levy does a fine job lining up the evidence for the pornification of American women. Her thesis is that the female self-image has a reached a new low. Heiress/porn star/actress Paris Hilton is only the poster girl. Ms. Levy presents dozens of other real-life examples—from middle-class college girls who beg to strip and fake “hot” lesbian action for the Girls Gone Wild cameras to porno writers on the best-seller list, Olympians posing for Playboy, the scary ubiquity of boob and vagina jobs among the middle class, misogynistic San Francisco lesbians remaking themselves as boorish teenage boys, pre-teens in thongs, teen girls hosting “rainbow parties” and, worst of all, women who should know better—well-educated women, veteran female entertainment industry hands—working behind the scenes producing this crap. These are the women Ms. Levy calls Female Chauvinist Pigs.

The premise lacks a wee bit of historical perspective. Anyone remember the 1970’s? At least in the venial-sins department, we’re not that much closer to hell’s burning lake today than we were back then. Coming of age in that raunchy decade, my pre-teen girlfriends and I dressed like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver whenever we could get away with it. Wild horses—let alone our horrified mothers—couldn’t have dragged us away from the blue eye shadow or our tube tops and “hot pants.” And when we graduated from that look, we squeezed ourselves into the slipperiest thigh-slit disco halter dresses and sallied forth to have as much sex as we could procure.

But that was before Ariel Levy’s time. The progeny of two 1960’s radicals, she came of age in the ultra-P.C. 1990’s and was educated at Wesleyan University, where the English department did not offer a class in the Western canon—and actually refused to add one to the curriculum when students asked for it. Instead, students got classes in how to deconstruct porn. (One wonders whether the Wesleyan English department has yet arrived at its “What were we thinking?” moment. Perhaps that’s for Ms. Levy’s next book.)

In any case, she somehow learned how to write very well. This book is deeply researched, sparkling with witty outrage, readable. What’s missing, though, is a stringent analysis of the cause of the problem, the succinct J’accuse.

Reading this litany of “raunch,” I tried to identify the common denominator between this era and that of my sordid youth. The obvious similarity is the high price of oil—perhaps some freakonomist will demonstrate a correlation between the rising price of Saudi crude and the willingness of American girls to dress and act like street whores.

Ms. Levy doesn’t go there. Instead of searching for answers in the larger political-cultural moment—wartime, economic uncertainty, vast right-wing hypocrisy—she looks to the women’s movement of the 1970’s and finds her culprit there. Talk about blaming the victim.

In Ms. Levy’s analysis, the schism that erupted in the women’s movement between the Andrea Dworkin–Catharine MacKinnon anti-porn faction and the “pro-sex” sexual-liberation feminists ultimately left women in a quandary. The women’s movement was blown apart when its leaders split on whether sex with men was tantamount to rape, or pornography was the starting point for liberation. To Ms. Levy, today’s “hot” baby hos are paying the price for this confusion.

She’s quite right that that split was bad news. But the women’s movement was ultimately beaten by the stronger forces of darkness that opposed it, specifically the powerful alliance forged to kill the Equal Rights Amendment, which then brutally turned the argument about women’s liberation away from the finer points—day care and equal pay, for example—and into a desperate trench war simply to keep abortion legal. Distracted for decades by that fundamental threat, the women’s movement has been unable to deliver other benefits that it might once have promised, including offering a path to healthy sexuality and self-image for women.

Though it misplaces the blame, Ms. Levy’s provocative book identifies a trend. The current pornification of America has coincided exactly with the triumph of the right wing. This shouldn’t surprise anyone: Prick a radical conservative and the kink oozes out. You can bet your riding crop that Capitol Hill’s dungeon dominatrices, strip-club owners and proprietors of members-only “swinger” boîtes welcomed four more years of W.

Pundits on the right will of course reply that “blowjob” only became part of the national pre-teen lexicon thanks to Bill Clinton’s lascivious ways. But haven’t Presidents—even Presidents from Texas, where such acts are illegal—always had the pleasure of oral ministration? It took the Republicans to bore a keyhole through which the nation could peer.

Ms. Levy doesn’t have much to say about the right’s taste for voyeurism, though that’s certainly part of the story. She’s too busy damning the plastic-fantastic, pole-dancing, X-rated Paris Hilton version of female sexiness that so many women of all ages, and especially the youngest, have accepted as normal sexuality.

Back in the 1970’s, women expected to enjoy sex—or anyway, my girlfriends and I did. According to Ms. Levy, today’s commodified hotties aren’t in it for fun. She argues that the garish pornification of women’s sexuality, and women’s willingness to go along with it and to pretend to like it, is damaging women. She cites example after example of thong-wearing, blowjob-giving high-school girls admitting to having sex without feeling anything at all, and without expecting to, and of American women everywhere who have completely internalized the notion that their bodies exist not for their own but for male pleasure. She’s right on, if a little gynocentric. She might have discussed how porno makes rotten lovers of men, too.

On so many levels that it would require a full-length term paper to quantify (perhaps some Wesleyan professor of porno deconstruction has already assigned it), George W. Bush is the quintessential Hooters guy. What Ariel Levy’s research shows is that during his ignominious reign, the entire country has become Hooterville—not the mythic cracker town, but a national amusement-park version of the bigbusted franchise. Women’s real sexual needs (such a quaint notion; even quainter to find there’s actually a thoughtful 30-year-old woman still writing about them) are simply irrelevant in a nation where the female role has been reduced to its darkest primordial essence: entertaining the troops.

Nina Burleigh’s most recent book is The Stranger and the Statesman (Perennial); her next book, about the French scientists who founded Egyptology, will be published by William Morrow in June 2006.

But we failed to spot anyone from the New York City delegation.

Sigh.

"Former Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said Tuesday that 'Karl Rove ought to be fired.'

"With Kerry on Capitol Hill was Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-New York, also a possible 2008 presidential contender, who indicated her agreement with Kerry's view.

'"I'm nodding,' she told reporters."

Also, ex-Republican Marshall Wittman has a smart take on why you shouldn't hold your breath for Rove's resignation.

The class issue has shadowed the war from the start but has lately been getting more attention. It is the impetus for several initiatives on Capitol Hill and a theme of Michael Moore's antiwar documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 . "It's a poverty draft," said Rick Jahnkow, who does anti-military recruiting in California. "The vast number of people in this country who are escaping this draft are not elites. They're middle-class or upper-middle-class people."

The issue started percolating politically last year.

"We were looking at casualties from Texas on the Department of Defense Web site and it struck us that 'Gee, these kids are coming from towns in Texas that we never heard of,'" said Robert G. Cushing, a retired sociology professor in Austin who works with the Austin American-Statesman . "Not just small towns. But small towns not even close to metropolitan areas."

The newspaper undertook a study of the numbers and found that while one in five Americans live in non-metropolitan counties, nearly one out of three casualties in Iraq have come from these counties. These are places that do not have a city over 50,000 people and are not within commuting distance of a big city. The paper's interviews with enlistees from these places have shown that they can't find good jobs in their communities and feel that a university education is out of their reach- they couldn't afford to move to a community near a state school.

Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking minority member on the House Armed Services Committee, was even more emphatic. Last fall he stated that 43.5 percent of the soldiers killed in Iraq came from rural cities and towns with a population below 20,000.

These kids tend to be rural white. The others who have been disproportionately affected are blacks and Hispanics from the inner city.

"I've heard people say, 'These kids want to fight, they volunteered,'" said Charles Rangel, the longtime Harlem congressman. "But I saw these kids go off to camp and then to Iraq, and I'll tell you, they need the sense of importance of a uniform. And they're torn. They say, 'Congressman, continue to fight against this war, but don't worry about me. I'm going to make you proud, I'm going to be a good goddamn staff sergeant.'"

Representative Rangel came out for the draft as a more equitable means of sharing the risk. He promptly heard from Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina.

"Fritz Hollings said, 'My rednecks are catching hell,'" Representative Rangel recalled. "In these small towns, you're a big shot if you have a couple of stripes on your shoulder or bars on your collar."

The issue took on a special poignancy in South Carolina last year after three young men from one small town high school, Orangeburg-Wilkinson, died in Iraq, sowing disturbance in that community.

How many high schools in Westchester or Montgomery County, Md., have similar records? None; we'd have heard about it.

While the draft proposal has gone nowhere on Capitol Hill, the larger issue of fairness has gained a following in the "red" districts, to cite the red/blue divide of the last Presidential election. One conservative Republican, Sen. James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, has endorsed the call for a draft, while another, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, has called for a national debate over the question. In the meantime, Mr. Skelton has called on the General Accounting Office to study the socioeconomic composition of the military.

Michael Moore has also showed up on Capitol Hill. In a scene in his new documentary, the filmmaker and provocateur approaches three congressmen outside the Capitol, trying to recruit their children to the military. According to people who have seen the film, the congressmen walk away flabbergasted or blathering.

The issue goes well beyond Congress. Anti-recruiter Rick Jahnkow points out that Junior ROTC's can be found in every high school in San Diego except for the three high schools on the affluent north side of town.

The same exemption goes for the big Northeastern cities. The most startling statistic produced by a Defense Department human-resources contractor (humrro.org/poprep2002) is that at the end of the Vietnam era, the Northeast provided 22 percent of the people in the military. Today that number has sunk to 14 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of enlistment from the South has risen. Enter Jessica Lynch.

"In so many communities the choices seem to be, here go work at Burger King or go into the Army where you can have a career path, and get money for college, get training for a career,'" said Nancy Lessin, a member of the anti-war group Military Families Speak Out.

The obvious response to this imbalance is that the military has always functioned in this manner, as a bridge for powerless groups to rise into the middle class. It served that role for white ethnics during World War II and for blacks in the last generation. The poor will always be over-represented at the front lines; the educated will almost always find jobs as paper-pushers.

Yet the difference in Iraq is that the selection of the poor is purer than ever. Yes, multitudes of affluent people got out of the draft during Vietnam. This time around they don't even have to worry about it. When Representative Susan Tauscher, a moderate Democrat serving the affluent hill communities outside Oakland, called for an increase of forces in Iraq and introduced legislation seeking more aggressive recruitment, she could be confident that those numbers won't be coming from her soccer-mom constituency.

And while the left often asserts that Iraq is recapitulating Vietnam, the big improvement from the military's standpoint is the passivity of those who oppose the war. Poll numbers suggest that opposition is widespread. But the campuses are quiet. There haven't been big anti-war demonstrations.

"All the demonstrations are on the telephone," said Emile Milne, an aide to Congressman Rangel.

For all their vehemence against the war, the affluent aren't waking up with nightmares about their children. If privileged youth were called upon to make the greatest sacrifice that a society demands of its citizens, this war would probably be ended in an instant. "The decisions about this war are being made by people with no personal stake," said Nancy Lessin (who said that on three occasions her organization tried to speak to John Kerry about the war, and on three occasions he could not make time for them).

Or as Congressman Rangel said, "It's easy to make the decision to go to war if you don't expect an uproar."

The poverty draft reflects the great divide in the new economy. The college-educated would regard it as a waste if their children were to join the military. No, they must be trained to the highest degree for participation in the global economy. Meanwhile, high risk can be outsourced, to the new immigrant from Guatemala or the ghetto kid who can't find employment. And to ice the deal, the military offers bonuses of tens of thousands of dollars to those who enlist, while editorialists who favor a larger military involvement call for "better incentives" and "better marketing" to enlistees.

There's got to be a better way to define citizenship. Representative Rangel served (and froze) in Korea, and while he didn't see the mission that time either, he has never forgotten the democratic lessons the military taught him: "We had the ability then to bring people of different classes and races together, and force their asses to respect each other."

The Iraq war has replaced that sense of a democratic collective with disrespect for those who can't participate in the new economy. And don't think that the citizens of Arab oligarchies don't see that. We like to think that we're exporting democracy. So far we're exporting ruthless capitalism.

Certainly, money is what motivates political loyalty at the commanding heights of the economy, where there are very few illusions about the personal morality of politicians in either party. The average corporate chieftain is understandably reluctant to admit this, and if you ask why he hates Bill Clinton, he could try to persuade you that it's because of the President's bad character. But in a more candid mood, the businessman may confide that he has really hated Mr. Clinton ever since the President raised his taxes in 1993.

Money, not sex, is likely to become the hottest issue in the New York Senate race very soon. Neither of the leading candidates to succeed Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is in a position to emphasize "family values," and that issue has never sold well here, anyway. In the midst of the greatest economic expansion in history, the question is what to do with the Treasury's anticipated surpluses.

To date, only Hillary Rodham Clinton has offered a forthright answer: Preserve Social Security and Medicare, maintain domestic spending at adequate levels and begin to reduce the national debt. Whatever is then left may be applied to a modest tax cut, aimed largely but not exclusively at the middle class and working families.

Rudolph Giuliani's mumbling response is that he favors a tax cut, though maybe not quite as big as that proposed by his fellow Republicans in Washington. The normally outspoken Mayor-a man rarely lacking an opinionated opinion on any topic-knows that for most New Yorkers, problems such as deteriorating schools take priority over tax cuts.

That preference, already strongly expressed in opinion surveys, will become even more acute if voters learn the dimensions of the tax and budget cuts that Mr. Giuliani's comrades on Capitol Hill are planning. The Republican redistribution scheme would turn 25 percent of tax-cut revenue over to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The next 19 percent of high-income taxpayers would receive half of the tax cut-meaning that three-fourths of the tax cut would further enrich the wealthiest people in the country. The remaining 80 percent of the population would share a measly one-quarter of the G.O.P. tax cut.

It gets worse, particularly if you're a New Yorker with children but without a six- or seven-figure income. The budget cuts that Congressional Republicans want to impose-since they know that even their wildly optimistic surplus projections cannot finance their tax-cut orgy-will drastically reduce educational and vocational opportunities for New York's children.

Estimates of the specific impact are available from the Federal Office of Management and Budget, and they show plainly that New York risks losing billions of dollars in critical education funding over the next decade. (Much of that money would show up here, of course, in the form of tax cuts for the needy denizens of Wall Street, Park Avenue and East Hampton. L.I.)

By the year 2009, the Republican budget would cost New York more than $900 million in Title I funding annually, cutting the number of children benefiting from that program by 357,000, or roughly half. Pell grants that help low-income and working-class families send their children to college would likewise be cut in half, costing the state almost $500 million a year and leaving more than 60,000 students without Federal assistance.

New York would also lose more than half of the money the President plans to spend on reducing class sizes in public schools, or about $140 million a year-which will mean about 7,000 fewer teachers in the state's classrooms. Headstart, a Federal program that even many Republicans admit is an important success, would be halved, depriving 23,000 children of badly needed help.

There is much more statistical data, but numbers on the page can't convey what these decisions will mean in real life. To snatch opportunity from the most vulnerable young Americans so that the most pampered can have more ought to shock the conscience, which is the effect these proposals had on most moderate Republicans in the Senate.

The Mayor probably disagrees with his party's Congressional leadership, but he can't afford to irritate his new friends in Washington.

He already owes them for pushing Representative Rick Lazio of Long Island out of the Republican primary and for inducing Gov. George Pataki to cough up an endorsement. And he will need lavish funding from the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and all the lobbyists controlled by Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell and Tom DeLay.

So money speaks louder than the Mayor. Which raises the strange possibility that most New Yorkers might be better represented by that woman carrying the carpetbag.

Cigarettes and narcotics are rarely mentioned in the same shortened breath, a symptom of American schizophrenia regarding addiction. Narcotics cause death and disease, so we strive to eradicate them by any and all means, from military intervention abroad to vast prisons at home. Cigarettes cause death and disease, but we do almost nothing to eradicate them and much to promote their production. The same elected officials who blather on about executing drug dealers are quietly coddling tobacco profiteers.

This curious double standard is sufficiently entrenched that almost no one notices it even when the two issues are directly linked, as they were in the final hours of debate over the tobacco bill. In their scheme to kill that legislation, Republicans raised narcotics as a red herring. They were encouraged by one of their favorite pollsters, who found that "the power of the teenage smoking issue can be completely overwhelmed when recast as a message where the [Republican] candidate places a higher priority on cracking down on illegal drug use …" Thus the Republicans added anti-drug programs as amendments to the tobacco bill, then proceeded to send the entire bill back to committee.

The same day, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, General McCaffrey took the opportunity to attack critics of the nation's 50-year "drug war" as "a carefully camouflaged, exorbitantly funded, well-heeled elitist group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United States." General McCaffrey, who retired from the Army, is also a firm believer in the traditional methods of interdiction and incarceration to combat drugs, although there is scant evidence that these methods have achieved anything besides raising the street price of heroin, cocaine and marijuana, thereby attracting more criminal investment in their importation and sale.

The long-term effect of this policy, as economist Milton Friedman will gladly explain, is that Federal tax revenues are indirectly fattening the profits of drug pushers. Mr. Friedman, the Nobel laureate and conservative icon, is among those "elitists" General McCaffrey denounced. Along with 499 other prominent Americans, including former Secretary of State George Shultz, Mr. Friedman signed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times calling for a new approach to drug abuse, which was timed to coincide with the United Nations special session on drugs.

That ad promoted "harm reduction," the view that prohibition alone is useless and that less repressive measures such as medical treatment and needle exchange are preferable to punishment. Under this approach, marijuana might be legalized and taxed, with the proceeds used to fund expansion of the nation's terribly inadequate treatment facilities.

Such notions shock General McCaffrey, who promotes alarming theories about the deleterious effects of marijuana, one of the safer substances known to humankind. He and others like him warn that pot is a "gateway drug" leading to heroin and cocaine-while failing to mention studies that show cigarettes also entice teenagers toward perdition. The McCarthyite baiting of anyone who suggests that these public health problems are all related serves only as a cover for the tobacco business.

As a longtime smoker who has tried to quit more than once, I know something about addiction. Where prohibition tends to glamorize the forbidden, regulation can create useful barriers. If tobacco were criminalized, smokers would obtain it nevertheless, but I suspect more than a few secretly agree that the tobacco industry must be curbed, that restrictions on smoking are helpful to those attempting to smoke less, and that the medical consequences of our habit need to be compensated through taxation. In a society where medical costs are largely socialized, even though medical care is not, government has a legitimate interest in discouraging behavior that causes so much illness.

Poor people, of course, suffer the most from tobacco promotion as well as narcotics trafficking. So it is amusing to hear the Republicans, so eager to snatch money from the poor at every opportunity, suddenly worrying about the burden on low-income smokers that higher taxes would cause. Let's cut food stamps, welfare, the minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit, they cry, but don't touch that disposable income spent on cigarettes by disposable people.

If they were truly concerned about the tobacco bill's regressive economic impact, they might return those funds to the affected families by providing them with health care. They might insist that tobacco taxes be used to fund narcotics treatment on demand as an alternative to prison. They might admit, finally, that nicotine, opiates and alkaloids are all public health problems that will yield to no military solution.

But that would mean overcoming two of their most harmful habits: hard rhetoric about narcotics and soft money from tobacco.