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 our “Window on The Week” podcast, read by NRO’s Stephen Spruiell here.

‐ Hillary Clinton’s fans insist that the private Hillary has a terrific sense of humor, regularly leaving her intimates clutching their stomachs and gasping for air. Campaigning in Iowa last weekend, it looked as though Senator Clinton was finally sharing her gift for hilarity with the rest of us. In response to a question about how she would handle the kind of men who rule Iran and North Korea, she said, “We face lots of dangers in the world, and . . . a lot of evil men. People like Osama bin Laden come to mind. [Pause. Shrug.] What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?” She appeared taken aback when the last comment was met with raucous laughter, hoots, and whistles. Naturally, everyone in the room thought, “Bill!” Everyone but Hillary, that is. When later asked whether she was referring to her rascally husband, she replied, “Oh, come on. Well, I don’t think anybody in there thought that,” thereby flunking the “listening” part of her latest listening tour. Of course she didn’t mean Bill. She doesn’t think he’s evil or bad, just recklessly self-indulgent and stupid enough to get caught. Alas, the joke was inadvertent, and Hillary’s humor remains in a lockbox.

‐ In all fairness, when Sen. Joe Biden, who recently announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, labeled Barack Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he probably intended to insert the words “presidential candidate” into the mix. But the remark is nonetheless telling. It reveals, first, Biden’s tendency toward runaway rhetoric. More significantly, it says something about how Biden sees Obama. By focusing on his looks and style as they relate to his skin color, Biden suggested that the mere fact of Obama’s being black matters more than his record and his policy ideas. One suspects that a great many Democrats feel the same way.

‐ Good thing we have Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to fight George W. Bush’s plan to destroy Mother Earth. Waxman convened a hearing to determine whether administration officials “censored” climate-change research by government scientists. In fact, this censorship amounted to minor — and, by all reasonable accounts, factually accurate — edits to a document that, far from being strictly scientific, had clear policy implications. The chief complaint of one witness was that the administration had tried to change the headline of a press release accompanying his research paper (not the title of the paper itself). We fail to see here a nefarious plot to muzzle the truth. What we do see is a Democratic stunt that, under the banner of not politicizing science, is doing precisely that.

‐ In the wake of record-high crop prices and intense pressure from trading partners to reduce the trade-distorting financial support the U.S. provides to its farmers, President Bush proposed cutting farm subsidies by as much as $4.5 billion over the next ten years. While the proposal is grounds for cautious optimism, it is far from revolutionary — we’ve been down this road many times before. Funding levels are reduced during the good times, but restored the minute crop prices take a dip or the land yields a suboptimal harvest. Even if the cuts go through as envisioned, America’s agricultural sector will continue to benefit from a kind of welfare the country’s non-farming sectors could scarcely imagine. Farm subsidies remain one of the federal government’s worst examples of waste, fraud, and abuse. Bush’s proposal is but a small step toward fixing the problem.

‐ The Democrats killed a $30 million grant program to fund universal AIDS testing for newborns. Democrats smugly described the program as an “earmark” that Republicans should be happy to see go, but this was no cost-cutting measure; the money will now revert to a general pool for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which in recent years has paid for such AIDS-prevention efforts as a “workshop on sex toys” in San Francisco and a seminar on safe sex in St. Louis that featured a porn star wearing nothing but a towel and boots. The real reason Democrats killed the program is that an assortment of left-wing groups oppose “violating the privacy” of mothers by encouraging them to get tested and mandating testing for their newborns — even though such efforts in New York and elsewhere have dramatically reduced the number of infants born with AIDS. That the Democrats would defund this program is disgraceful; that they would defend their action as part of the fight against earmarks is even more so.

‐ French president Jacques Chirac gave the lie to the fiction of Western resolve against Iran when he told several newspapers that it would be no big deal for Iran to build a bomb or two. In fairness to Chirac, we note that he didn’t entirely deny the danger of Tehran’s nuclear program: It could lead, he said, to further proliferation in the Middle East. This is indeed a grave threat, but hardly the only one. Chirac said nothing of the conventional military aggression the mullahs might be emboldened to undertake once they were armed with nukes. And he completely dismissed the notion that they might ever use their arsenal. (This may be unlikely; it would also be so disastrous that we should be unwilling to accept even a small probability of its happening.) Official French policy holds that Iran must not be allowed to go nuclear. Embarrassed to have strayed from orthodoxy, Chirac reconvened the newspapers the next day and clarified his meaning. In the event, he assured us that Iran is a “great country” with “an important role to play” as a force for stability. Nice to see him talking tough again.

‐ The University of Wisconsin has decided to hire its first military-history professor in 15 years — an action that the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, credits National Review with motivating. Last fall, NR’s John J. Miller reported on the decline of military history in higher education and called attention to the fact that Wisconsin had refused to hire a military historian even though the late author Stephen Ambrose and others had donated more than $1 million for that purpose. Miller concluded: “Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty.” This charge led to “a flurry of discussion,” according to the Cardinal. Within a few weeks, Gary Sandefur, dean of the college of letters and science, authorized the history department to begin a search, which is ongoing. If the school hires a traditional military historian — as opposed, for instance, to a “peace and gender” scholar — then the good guys will have won a skirmish in the culture wars. And it will demonstrate that, at least in Madison, a little badgering can go a long way.