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.

‐The House voted 245–171 on Thursday to approve a new rule that imposes disclosure requirements on any congressman who sponsors an earmark. The rule, which will take effect immediately, requires House committees to provide a list of earmarks in each authorizing, appropriations, or tax bill — disclosing who added them, who will benefit from them, and how much they will cost. It will apply only to House bills, but any earmarks added in conference and then returned to the House would also have to be disclosed before a final vote. This is a worthy step toward reducing pork-barrel spending, but the fight against waste, fraud, and abuse is far from over. For starters, the Senate should pass a similar rule. More broadly, Republicans should enact budget reforms that make it easier for members to strip especially egregious earmarks from must-pass legislation. The best reform would be the elimination of earmarks altogether, but given yesterday’s thinner-than-expected margin of victory on this very modest change, we expect that Congress won’t soon kick its pork addiction.

‐On September 12, Syrian security forces killed four terrorists outside the U.S. embassy in Damascus. Condoleezza Rice thanked Syria for saving American lives, but added, “It’s too early to tell who might have been responsible for the attack.” There are two possibilities: first, that Bashar al-Assad’s grip is weakening. It is no small feat to plan and execute an attack in a police state. Second, that Assad’s regime was complicit — and “foiled” the attack to influence American policy. Syria loves to ask Cui bono? after every terrorist outrage. Well, if Washington forgets about Damascus’s responsibility for the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, its complicity in the Iraqi insurgency, or its willingness to let terrorist groups call Damascus home, that would become an interesting question indeed.

‐Former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s visit to Harvard had an almost hallucinatory strangeness about it. The regime of which he is a symbol was born in rejection of Western liberalism and christened in an act of war against the United States (its seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran). Its nuclear program constitutes what may be the greatest current threat to American security. So what does America’s premier university do? Why, it gives him a platform to denounce America’s “imperialist” and “colonialist” tendencies. Thankfully, some Harvard students are more sensible: The campus Democrats and Republicans united to protest Khatami’s speech, and members of the audience asked him tough questions about Iran’s threats to annihilate Israel and its execution of homosexuals. Would that the U.N. Security Council — still balking at the imposition of sanctions against Tehran for its nuclear program — were so principled.

‐When South Korean president Roh Moo Hyun appeared with President Bush for a press conference on the White House lawn, both leaders remarked on the strength of the U.S.–South Korean alliance. But if their remarks weren’t incorrect, neither were they the whole story. For on the security concern that has long cemented the alliance — the threat posed by North Korea — the U.S. and South Korea are increasingly parting ways. The United States wants tough sanctions against Kim Jong Il’s regime for its building of nuclear weapons and its ballistic-missile tests; South Korea opposes such sanctions and continues to “engage” Kim. This engagement has done nothing to moderate North Korea’s bellicosity, but Seoul shows no sign of letting reality intrude upon its policy. This is bad for us, bad for them, and bad for the millions of North Koreans who suffer under Kim’s tyranny.

‐On Thursday, Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir reaffirmed that his government will not allow U.N. peacekeepers to stop the re-escalating violence in the Darfur region. If peacekeepers are not sent to Darfur, the killers will recommence their genocide; but Sudan — which patronizes the militias responsible for the atrocities, and which is indiscriminately bombing villages thought to harbor rebels — has said that its military will attack any force attempting to enter the country. This leaves the civilized world facing a dilemma. There is a limit to the amount of blood and treasure a nation can spend on a humanitarian cause with no direct connection to its interests. But, at a minimum, NATO should enforce a no-fly zone over the country to stop the bombing, and the U.N. Security Council should impose immediate and severe economic sanctions on Khartoum. Only by making it clear that the Sudanese regime will pay a high price for its actions can we avoid the choice between sending an invasion force, on one hand, and tolerating the rape and murder of hundreds of thousands of people, on the other.

‐For four decades, the family has been under deconstruction. This experiment continues even now, after its folly has been made manifest. Efforts at reiterating the nature of the family and proposing ways in which the law can foster its good are of prime importance. Such efforts are to be found in “Marriage and the Law: A Statement of Principles,” a document just released by the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, which is signed by more than 100 legal and family scholars. The basic argument is this: The family is the best environment in which to raise children, and it is the purpose of family law to protect and promote marriage so as to ensure that children are raised in a stable family with a mother and a father. As the report argues, the prevalent understanding of marriage in family law — founded on “the idea that no family form is superior to any other family form” — “is based on demonstrably false and therefore destructive premises. Adopting it in family law as a practice or as an academic discipline will likely make it harder for civil society in the United States to strengthen marriage as a social institution.” One hopes this report will help prevent that outcome.

‐More4 is a British digital-TV channel dedicated to offering features on “lifestyle” and “the arts,” and to presenting an “alternative take” on the news. ’Nuff said. It is not very surprising to learn that the lifestyle-aware, artsy, alternative folk at More4 were the ones behind Death of a President, the movie debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last weekend. DOAP, as it is already being called, uses computer-generated images to show George W. Bush being assassinated. President Dick Cheney then exploits the resulting panic to push through Congress a new Patriot Act, which, according to one sympathetic reviewer, “further enhances the American police state and broadens the powers of the executive branch.” Uh-huh. The assassin is an American “sickened by the needless carnage in Iraq,” but of course the Cheney administration pins the crime on an innocent Arab in order to whip up more hysteria. What imagination! What cutting-edge satire! Defending his silly film, director Gabriel Range said: “I wanted it to feel like it’s about the world we live in now.” Well, he succeeded. DOAP certainly does resemble the precious little left-wing echo chamber that directors at “alternative” British TV companies inhabit. The rest of us would rather watch something more intellectually stimulating — the next Paris Hilton movie, perhaps.