The Week April 14-20

14.Those who can get Senate confirmation, do; those who can't . . . keynote? John R. Bolton, who never got the chamber's approval to become ambassador to the United Nations, will deliver the spotlight speech at today's launch of Global Governance Watch, a joint project of the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society.

The group says it aims to "address issues of transparency and accountability at the United Nations, in NGOs, and related international organizations." Bolton's criticism of the United Nations in both regards has been, well, frank.

The man who headed the U.S. mission to the United Nations for a year, after President Bush installed him through a recess appointment, once famously noted that if the Secretariat Building in New York "lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." Also: "There's no such thing as the United Nations." And he once complained at a forum that the international body was beset "by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions."

That last came at a symposium organized by the Federalist Society, so perhaps a similar level of candor should be expected from today's address.

15.On April 15, taxes are either the last thing people want to think about or the only thing they can focus on. Capitalizing on this, the Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing on tax reform Tuesday, featuring testimony from academic experts in taxation. As a committee spokesman noted, "there is no better day than April 15 to begin this discussion. Appetites for tax reform will be at their peak."

One of those experts will be Daniel N. Shaviro, who teaches tax law at New York University and knows well the pain of the Form 1040. "I was just finishing up my TurboTax filing myself," he said Friday afternoon. "I gave up doing it by hand years ago. It's just sort of a complicated, unpleasant process. One of the funny things is how unnecessary it is. The government already has most of the information."

Taxes could be like E-ZPass for most people, he said, or, at the very least, like renewing a driver's license. "It's a little different, but it's not a ridiculous comparison," he said.

Jason Furman, who directs the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, will also testify, and he plans to talk about some of the most fundamental aspects of the tax code. "Everyone wants taxes to be simpler, but also to get tax breaks for a lot of things," he said. "If we could really have a cleaner tax code for everyone, that would be a better idea." But any conversation about tax reform is, of course, a "multi-year conversation," he acknowledged.

Furman also noted that he won't complete his own return by the April 15 deadline and had already requested an extension. For him, "October 15th -- that's tax day," he said.

16.There have been forums, speeches and endless campaigning, but, for nearly two months, no debates between Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. Not since Feb. 26 in Cleveland (remember "Meet me in Ohio"?) have the two Democrats been side by side to face media questions.

That ends Wednesday when they return to Philadelphia, which hosted a Democratic debate in October -- remembered most often for Clinton's fumbling assessment of the proposal by then-New York Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses. Now, with Spitzer no longer around, a much-emptier Democratic field and a high-stakes Pennsylvania primary right around the corner, the debate sequel will be held at the National Constitution Center. The stage will be familiar to Obama; it is where he delivered his speech on race in America last month.

One footnote on the debate schedule: The candidates haven't quite reached a year of debating yet, but they're getting close. The first debate of the 2008 campaign was April 26, 2007, in Orangeburg, S.C.

By Rachel Dry