Commentary, editorials and opinion, opinions

By MARTIN SCHRAM
In the category of how Washington really works _ and often doesn't _ it is important to note just how often the smartest and most experienced players and observers seem to lose sight of how and why things really happen in the capital city.

Especially, they seem to forget what they know best: That things in Washington don't happen in a linear and logical way.

An editorial / By Dale McFeatters
The Bush administration has few allies in the world, and it is now going to lose the staunchest of them.

Facing a growing revolt in his own party, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced last week that he would step down within the year, well before the 2010 statutory date for the next election.

The plan presumably is for a seamless handover to Blair's heir apparent, the dour chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, who has the tricky task of positioning himself to replace the prime minister without looking as if he were trying to push his patron out the door.

This may not sit well with the voting public, the newly resurgent Conservative Party or others within Labor who may not see the transition as all that automatic.

By DAVID LAZARUS
Investors cheered last week's news that Chevron and its partners had discovered potentially the largest U.S. oil find in a generation, a deposit of as much as 15 billion barrels deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico.

At the Sierra Club in Washington, Athan Manuel, the environmental group's director of lands protection, could only shake his head in dismay.

"This isn't going to ease our dependence on foreign oil," he said.

By JOHN M. CRISP
Roger Moran would like for more of us to withdraw our children from the public schools and teach them at home. A member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, Moran believes that public schools are places where God is ridiculed, where drugs and alcohol are rampant, and where promiscuous _ even homosexual _ lifestyles are encouraged.

According to a recent Associated Press article by David Crary, Moran complains, "Humanism and evolution can be taught, but everything I believe is disallowed."

Moran is a prominent proponent of a movement made up of groups like Considering Homeschooling Ministry and Exodus Mandate, which want to encourage as many as 1 million students to abandon public schools for homeschooling.

By JEFF BLANCHARD
Before there were traffic jams, before there was a Kennedy Compound, even before there was a Cape Cod Canal with bridges between the mainland and the flexed arm that juts out into the Atlantic, windmills were the most conspicuous manmade objects on the peninsula's landscape.

The Cape's oldest surviving windmill is on Route 6 in the center of Eastham and was built in 1680, or just about 150 years before the town's other man-made icon, Nauset Light.

A recent Google search turned up nothing on the abutters' reaction to the construction of either.

Editorial
Mexico's Federal Election Tribunal has finally confirmed the election of Felipe Calderon as president of Mexico, finding little evidence of widespread election fraud. The news was received with predictable anger by supporters of populist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the former Mexico City mayor.

By DAN K. THOMASSON
Ever wonder what the state of the world would be if Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq with an iron fist? A few late-night comedians have braved potential patriotic wrath by suggesting perhaps he should be brought back, a shuddering thought given his propensity for mass graves.

Now for the first time a prominent U.S.

Editorial
His name was Steve Irwin, but kids knew him as the "The Crocodile Hunter." He was the blond-mopped Aussie who grappled with slimy, scaly and sharp-toothed beasts on Animal Planet and explained what's interesting about them besides their scary looks.

Irwin, amazingly, is gone _ killed last week at the age of 44 by a stingray on the Great Barrier Reef, off Australia.

By MARSHA MERCER
It takes a lot to surprise people in the age of 24/7 news. So much information bombards us that it seems we've heard everything before.

But President Bush and his team know the value of surprise.

An editorial / By Dale McFeatters
The mystery of who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame has been solved. It was former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who owned up after special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald released him from a vow of confidentiality.

Much grief would have been spared if Armitage had spoken up _ and Fitzgerald allowed him to _ at the outset of this overblown affair three years ago.

In Washington, leaks of information to the press are rarely the kind of clandestine exchange in a dark parking garage popularized in the movie "All the President's Men." They are, most often, an organic part of long-range, regular contacts between reporters and their sources, and they are integral to how a large, sprawling democracy functions.

Rarely sinister and most often innocuous, leaks are intended to provide context, background and, yes, since we're all adults here, to further an agenda.