THE OTHER PUERTO RICAN CONTROVERSY
Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Rossello knows how to avoid another FALN crisis: Make Puerto Rico a state. "As long as this problem [of Puerto Rican status] isn't solved permanently, we will continue having this kind of confrontation," he proclaimed last weekend. He may not mean it to sound like a threat, but those words ominously seem to say: Grant us statehood or head for the bomb shelter.

The Republican Party apparently agrees. At the RNC's summer meeting in Philadelphia last July, the GOP endorsed "the right of self-determination" for Puerto Rico. Which means the RNC thinks the island should keep holding referenda every couple of years until a simple majority of voters there finally endorse statehood. The kind of self-determination ordinary Puerto Ricans have been advocating for years--please just keep things they way they are now--doesn't count.

VENTURA VS. BUCHANAN -- II
Speaking of Colin Powell's "centrism" a few years back, John B. Judis of the New Republic noted that there are two possible "centers" in American politics: the "sensible center" and the "radical middle." By the former he meant the socially liberal, free market politics of the upscale suburbanites on the coasts and in the gentrified sections of the big cities. By the latter he meant the culturally conservative, protectionist politics of downscale, rural and Southern whites. Sensible-centrist journalists are always describing the radical middle as "angry," not least because it often is: It thinks that welfare cheats, bankers, and lobbyists have taken control of the government. The sensible center, meanwhile, thinks it controls the government.

A Reform Party race between Patrick Buchanan and Jesse Ventura or one of his proxies would pit the radical middle against the sensible center. The twist is that each would be in the garb of the other. Ventura has married a conventional, mildly liberal politics to an outrageous style; Buchanan courts the Harley vote in a 1950s office uniform.

Speaking of Ventura's proxies, the reason he is courting Donald Trump is that he doesn't have a national fundraising base and needs Trump not only to finance his own bid but also to supply a Ventura-Reform Party with soft money. Soft money is, as everyone knows, the root of all evil. Abolishing it is part of the Reform Party's agenda