REPUBLICANS GET SOME VERY BAD NEWS
Republicans Get Some Very Bad News Republican senators got an unwelcome jolt last week at one of their usually uneventful Tuesday lunch meetings—a poll that showed they were in deep trouble. The...
...Asa Hutchinson and Sen...
...The politics of campaign-finance reform could be more interesting over the next few weeks than most pundits currently expect...
...but "this is, after all, a town where memories of the McCarthy era blacklist are still alive...
...For the first time in Clinton's presidency more Americans "strongly approved" of his performance than "strongly disapproved...
...With John McCain ready to force a confrontation on campaign reform in the Senate against the wishes of most of his GOP colleagues, there was a fair amount of senatorial murmuring about looking for a way to avoid being cast as simple defenders of the status quo...
...The kids have requested permission to live off-campus, saying that the co-ed dorms are incompatible with their sense of privacy and the religious principle of modesty...
...The poll, conducted by the Republican National Committee during the first week of September, gave the president his highest positive rating ever—almost 65 percent...
...The episode serves as a reminder of the Clinton administration's carelessness when it comes to controlling the spread of this technology...
...Success won't come easily, as highlighted by an incident last week...
...Only upon doing so did they discover the computer was being used at the Chinese military's Changsha Institute of Science and Technology...
...Mitch McConnell are set to introduce amendments to the highway bill eliminating the 10 percent set-aside that steers federal funds to "disadvantaged" (minority-owned) contractors...
...For the first time this year, the numbers showed that more Americans wanted Democrats to control Congress than Republicans, and that Democrats were ahead on the "generic ballot" for November 1998...
...Up until that point, the administration had expressed no concern that U.S.-made computers were being illegally diverted to Chinese military installations...
...McConnell is likely to encounter the same buzzsaw when he introduces his amendment early next month...
...Screenwriters in Los Angeles...
...God forbid, so to speak, that anyone should be allowed to opt out for religious reasons...
...NPR, Taxes, and Joe McCarthy National Public Radio's "Morning Edition"—once satirized by right-wingers as "Morning Sedition"— actually ran a weepy story last week on a group of small-business owners who work from their homes and feel oppressed by high business taxes and government licensing requirements...
...The Times quoted William Reinsch, the top Commerce Department official overseeing export controls: "We think that this incident with China shows that the system works...
...And it's also a town where the median age of screenwriters is 29, and having a sense of history typically means being able to come up with clever late-70s pop-culture references for Wayne's World sequels...
...The highway bill is notorious for being larded with pork, thus the logic behind the Hutchinson/McConnell effort: If you're going to feed at the trough, it shouldn't be based on the color of your snout...
...Lynn Martin's Glass Brain Lynn Martin, former Bush labor secretary and unsuccessful Illinois GOP Senate candidate, on next year's potential GOP candidate against Democrat Carol Moseley-Braun: "She's not afraid of being a woman, not afraid of being strong, not afraid of the whole gamut...
...Congress can keep the heat on the administration by making sure that this fall's defense bill retains a provision monitoring supercomputer exports...
...There are women's centers to accommodate the feminists, needle exchanges to accommodate drug users, multicultural centers to raise cultural awareness, academic departments for the literature of every marginalized society around the world, and shared bathrooms in co-ed dorms for the gender egalitarians...
...The GOP has little to show for its efforts, but that could soon change...
...Yale has refused, citing its rule that freshmen and sophomores must live in the campus community...
...Funny, universities across the country are already in chaos precisely because they do bend over backward to accommodate everyone's sensitivities...
...Not quite...
...The New York Times reported last Friday that the Chinese government is planning to return a high-performance supercomputer to the United States...
...Yale's Immodesty_ Freshman year at college is generally considered a period of transition: You need time to make your way out from under the avalanche of free condoms and learn how to study with a constant hangover...
...Who says Republicans have run out of ideas...
...Shuster professes opposition to racial preferences in principle, but doesn't want any principles to get in the way of passing the highway bill...
...Hutchinson was one of a few committee members planning to introduce amendments at a Transportation subcommittee meeting...
...Guess Who's Misusing a Computer...
...Just who are these embattled entrepreneurs...
...The willingness of Republicans—Senate GOP leader Trent Lott in particular—to fight against racial preferences will offer a clue as to whether the party intends to pursue a spirited conservative agenda for the next year...
...Through the safeguards we have in place today, we detected this diversion...
...It also underscores the importance of congressional vigilance...
...The new issue: campaign-finance reform, which had moved from 2 or 3 percent in previous polls to double digits as the number one issue of concern...
...That is why a conflict has broken out between Yale and five Orthodox Jewish freshmen...
...There he will encounter an even more formidable opponent: Bud Shuster...
...Clinton administration officials learned the supercomputer had been diverted because earlier this year they were asked by congressional committees to investigate the matter...
...Right...
...But when the subcommittee chairman, Tom Petri, learned of the amendments, he held a quick voice vote on the $103 billion highway bill at a time when Hutchinson and other members sympathetic to him were not present...
...And universities can be quite insistent on subjecting all their new students to the mandatory acculturation that takes place in freshman dorms...
...But what really rattled the senators was that, when asked what issues they cared most about, Americans had moved one new item into the first tier along with the old standbys of crime, education, and the like...
...The Writers Guild has sued the city...
...And more damaging, considering that McCain's proposal is a constitutional catastrophe...
...A new city ordinance requires them to fill out licensing forms (like all who work at home) on which they must categorize their output as either "retail" or "wholesale"—an indignity which is probably a violation of their human, not to mention artistic, rights...
...What's more, city inspectors can perform inspections of the "workplace...
...It's not just that these struggling writers have to pay taxes, said Del Barco...
...The computer, which the Chinese bought from California-based Sun Microsystems, had been illegally diverted to a military facility, prompting Madeleine Albright to lodge a complaint with China's foreign minister in June...
...And NPR's reporter, Mandalit Del Bar-co, wins this week's Torricelli Recovered Memory prize, named for the senator who bragged of watching the Kefauver hearings—hearings that took place before he was born...
...That was not the worst of it...
...10-Percent Against Quotas Since winning control of Congress nearly three years ago, there's been lots of talk from Republicans about eliminating racial preferences...
...Hutchinson now plans to take the matter up this week at a meeting of the full Transportation committee...
...The New York Times picked up the story and ran a quote from history professor Ivan Marcus: "The university would be in chaos if it bent over backward to accommodate everyone's sensitivities...
Vol. 3 • September 1997 • No. 2
