EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of some of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like.

Listen to the “Window on The Week” audio here. ‐ Hawaii’s John C. Calhoun, Sen. Daniel Akaka, is sponsoring, for the second time, legislation that would hand over sovereignty of our island state to native Hawaiians. Akaka seeks to create what he calls the Native Hawaiian Governing Entity, a race-based government that would deal with Washington on issues legal, fiscal, and otherwise. “Native Hawaiians” — a group presumably to be based on blood, although it will be up to a nine-member panel to supply a precise definition — are in the minority on the island, but Akaka’s bill would nevertheless grant them a racial oligarchy, and in theory the right to secede from the union. Even if it never comes to that, the bill is an affront to anyone who believes in E pluribus unum.

‐ However well received in certain sectors on Wall Street, the suggestion that President Bush might use the State of the Union address to announce reengagement with the U.N. on global warming is deeply troubling. America needs affordable energy now more than ever, yet any bones thrown to Al Gore and his claque of environmentalists would simply raise energy prices while doing nothing to lower the global temperature. (Any emissions cuts capable of significantly affecting climate would have to go way beyond Kyoto, and would be politically and economically unthinkable.) There are signs that the president is moving toward Carter-era energy policies that will raise prices, destroy jobs, and weaken America. President Reagan wisely reversed that course. Europe’s emissions since Kyoto are growing faster than ours (clever rhetoric and name-calling notwithstanding) and the gap is growing. This should help us realize that American free enterprise knows how to manage energy better than the central planning, caps, and targets so beloved of the sophisticated continent.

‐ The administration announced that the president will stop authorizing the NSA’s terrorist-surveillance program. All monitoring of terrorist communications that cross into the United States will now occur under the authorization of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts. Spinning this apparent cave-in as a victory, Justice Department spokesmen contend that they have already gotten court authorization and that it permits everything the NSA program was doing, with equal “speed and agility.” This is a startling about-face, to say the least, since the administration cited FISA’s inadequacy as its reason for creating the NSA program in the first place. More generally, it’s hard to see how FISA (which requires a showing of probable cause and judicial approval) allows the same monitoring that is possible under the president’s constitutional authority (which, at most, requires that searches be reasonable, with no judicial supervision). When pressed for an explanation, attorney general Alberto Gonzalez said he’d love to give one except revealing the legal theory would get into classified “operational details.” Cynics might say that the administration has surrendered to pressure from Democrats and civil-liberties extremists, and that Justice is keeping its theory classified to avoid enraging those who suspect the new program will not be as effective as the old one. We’d like to think the cynics are wrong — but it’s not easy.

‐ Charles D. Stimson, deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs, sparked a firestorm when he criticized big law firms for providing free legal services to wartime enemy detainees and suggested that corporations boycott such firms. Stimson, a lawyer, has now apologized, saying that he recognizes the importance of providing vigorous legal assistance to the underprivileged. The Pentagon has also distanced itself from his remarks. We wonder why. Alien enemy combatants are not impoverished litigants or criminal defendants. They are not “accused” Americans to whom the Constitution guarantees counsel. Indeed, they are not even honorable prisoners of war — and even if they were, the Geneva Conventions would not guarantee them free counsel. In our system, lawyers may of course volunteer their assistance to anyone, including the enemy. But they are not entitled to have the rest of us regard that choice as admirable. Nor to have corporate clients — who pay the gargantuan fees that subsidize volunteer legal work — refrain from asking whether they’d rather hire attorneys who don’t help America’s mortal enemies. It’s worth remembering that the operative term here is pro bono publico.

‐ Democratic congressmen Maurice Hinchey and Dennis Kucinich and socialist senator Bernie Sanders are trying to combat the pernicious influence of conservative media by reviving the Fairness Doctrine. For those who don’t remember, the Fairness Doctrine was a Federal Communications Commission policy that required news programs broadcast over the public airwaves to present controversial issues in a balanced way. (The meaning of “balance” of course depended on the whims of the FCC.) The Reagan administration scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and the subsequent popularity of conservative talk radio has so bedeviled liberals that they are begging the government to step back in. According to them, the dearth of liberal radio hosts doesn’t reflect their unpopularity, but rather the unwillingness of media corporations to give liberals a chance. Leave aside for now the general nuttiness of this proposition, as well as its empirical falsity (corporations also own the liberal New York Times and MSNBC, and Air America went broke because it had no listeners). The more important point is that no free society should tolerate a government agency’s having the power to decide what constitutes “balanced” coverage.

‐ Federal prosecutors in New York, in cooperation with the New York district attorney, have indicted the man who ran the U.N. oil-for-food program. Benon Sevan is charged with fraud and with having accepted $160,000 in bribes related to the program. Currently he is in Cyprus, his homeland, a country that does not extradite its own citizens. Perhaps Sevan is content to spend the rest of his life there. But if the Mediterranean island proves too small for this U.N. globetrotter, he might want to look into whether he can work out some sort of deal with prosecutors — after all, there is plenty more investigating of the oil-for-food scandal to do, and Sevan could almost certainly help with it. His lawyer has made the laughable claim that the indictment was motivated by a desire to distract from “financial fraud and ineptitude by the United States in Iraq on an unprecedented scale.” Sadly, the number of people who care at all about U.N. corruption is quite small, and is composed mostly of those U.N. officials who might have thought themselves above the law. The risk of distraction is not very high.

‐ Readers may recall Chen Guangcheng, the blind human-rights activist in China about whom we have written before. Last August, Mr. Chen was sentenced to over four years in prison for exposing forced abortions and other abuses associated with China’s one-child policy. (The government manufactured charges of “willfully damaging property” and “organizing a mob to disturb traffic,” but his real offense was simply to embarrass China’s rulers.) Just this week, Chen’s appeal was rejected. His lawyers plan to lobby China’s highest court, and possibly the central government, on his behalf. We can predict how that will go. In related news, a new Chinese-government report has recommended further implementation of the one-child policy. The abuses against which Chen has bravely fought, then, are to continue.