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Rules, rules and more rules

The federal regulatory leviathan is producing new rules faster than dandelions sprout in summer, according to a Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis.

One benchmark of federal rulemaking is the Federal Register, the official publication in which all rules and proposed rules must appear.

In 1999, the Federal Register published 4,684 rules encompassing 71,161 pages, the greatest number of pages since the Carter administration.

Federal agencies currently are at work on another 4,538 proposed rules, of which 137 are projected by the federal government to have compliance costs of at least $100 million each.

The Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency are the two biggest producers of rules, accounting for 539 and 456 of the new rules, respectively.

More aggressive congressional oversight of agencies would at least slow down the production of rules, but one of Washington's dirty secrets is that Congress derives political advantage from making agencies take the heat for actions that properly should have been debated as legislation.

Assad used terror as a means to control domestic politics as well as to influence regional events. When Syrian citizens in one city got too restless, he ordered the entire city gassed with chemical weapons at a cost of an estimated 20,000 lives. And there should be no illusions about who really rules Lebanon today -- its real government sits in Damascus.

Will Bashar Assad be Syria's Gorbachev, an instrument of modest reforms that lead to the downfall of the old dictatorial order? It's plausible, but barely. Somehow one doubts that the elder Assad's inner circle would allow him to rise peacefully to power if they believed he would do anything other than continue his father's policies or rubber-stamp their own.