Tilting at Windmills

...And I suspect the president deserves to be the butt of those late night jokes...

...Another says that impeachment would be overkill...

...I think the letter writers are very close to the right solution...

...It was passed after there was reason to believe that overworked interns and residents had contributed to the death of 18-year-old Libby Zion...

...Fortunately, although they are more likely to kill other motorists, the damage they do is limited by the fact that 3 out of 5 of the sport utility owners are 40 to 65 years old, which is the safest group of drivers...

...He’s made the bureaucracy a lot leaner, but not a lot better...

...He still has his next job...

...Keith also collects three other pensions from the federal government: $1,546 a month for his military service, $1,324 for social security and $871 a month in widower's annuity for his wife's service in the CIA...

...Now that they’re desperate for someone to care for little Jennifer and Jason, I’ll bet many of them have changed their tune...

...It seems that the special prosecutor hired by the county to clean up corruption has run up a bill of $37,500 with the following results, according to Esther Schrader of the Los Angeles Times...

...This would be absurd to the point of insanity...

...Ashcroft would allow the tax to be deducted from income tax payments...

...But by the end of the year only three states were even trying to meet the requirement, according to David Whitman of US...

...There was the failure to itemize a Visa bill on one campaign contribution report, the missing employer addresses on another and a third report filed three days late...

...OKAY SO WHAT DO WE think about the Lewinsky hullaballoo...

...Kennedy wants to lower the present rate of 6.2 percent to 5.3 and make up for the lost revenue by having the tax apply to income over $65,000...

...This is the same mistake we made after liquor was re-legalized when Prohibition was repealed in 1933...

...Four congressmen plnning to retire at the end of this session will receive pensions that start between $96,452 and $98,694...

...This is what would worry me if I were in Bill Clinton’s shoes...

...A MAJOR TENET OF this magazine - both in its journalism, which seeks to find solutions, and in its politicial philosophy, neoliberalism, which tries to acknowledge liberal failures as it continues to seek to achieve liberal goals - is that we have to face facts that don’t fit our case...

...Still, his policy choices have been good enough that I’m convinced history will rank him in the upper half of American presidents...

...Keith has led a lonely crusade against this pension insanity...

...I don’t, however, agree that we can stop talking...

...I’VEG ENERALLY ADMIRED WALter Isaacson’s editing of Time, which has won two Monthly Journalism Awards in the past year...

...These actions may diminish our respect for him as a person, but as Molly says, they don’t screw the American people...

...Do you have any idea how well the top fifth of Americans are doing these days...

...A major factor, I suspect, is that gambling casinos are permitted to advertise...

...LINDA TRIPP MAKES $88,000 A year in her public affairs job at the Pentagon...

...At the White House she was considered “constantly disagreeable, someone who tried to act like a big gatekeeper, a player in everything, when she in fact was really only a secretary...

...Too many IVashingtonians have friends, neighbors, or relatives in on the goodies to want to blow the whistle...

...I am troubled, however, by the way he seems to be hitting on women who work for him, although I suspect that this has less to do with his power over them than with the fact that they happen to be around...

...One third of the Army’s 300 generals were aides at one point in their career...

...Sen...

...The setting is the august chamber of the United States Senate...

...Commitment to promoting racial understanding fell from 42 percent to 31.8 percent in the same period...

...wrote in this column in 1993, the president and his wife had no right to have Foster work, while serving as a government employee in the White House, on their private legal business...

...It’s also understandable...

...The Monthly has a solution to this one...

...1 think it was a wise decision...

...SIMILARBA D NEWS COMES FROM the United States Senate, where of the 14 nominees for federal judgeships who have waited longest to be confirmed, 12 are women or minorities...

...HAVE YOU CONSIDERED WHAT the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton would be like...

...Not only will the behemoths be in the hands of the people most likely to do harm with them but their brakes and other safety devices will have deteriorated...

...This may come as a surprise to those who have the impression that government employees are all underpaid...

...Gossip is human...

...And the 100 memben of the United States Senate gravely attend to the evidence - evidence adduced by questions like “And what happened after he unzipped his zipper...

...The number of registered recreational boats has more than doubled in the last two decades...

...Consider the case of Vince Foster...

...This is because the typical sale price for these vehicles is close to $30,000...

...We call it that because it weighs heaviest on working people with modest incomes and is not paid on income over $65,000...

...ONE OF THE SUREST CAREER steps for a military officer aspiring to high rank is to become an aide to a general...

...are now so common...

...Incidentally his civil service pension includes credit for his year in the military even though he also gets a military pension for that service...

...Because of her “sour attitude,” she was viewed as “something of a dangerous commodity” Is it right to ship someone who is “constantly disagreeable” from one part of the joint to another...

...EVEN IF YOU CONSIDER YOURself enlightened in matters of the heart, you may pause at the title of a lecture given at a conference on women’s sexuality at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York: “Safe, Sane and Consensual S&M: An Alternative Way of Loving...

...The catch to this proposal is that it doesn’t offer a way to replace the lost income...

...According to Don Phillips of The Washington Post, ‘TPS now costs two cents a gallon more...

...Even in states like Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Utah, the figure is more than $100,000...

...Another suggests the Papuan term “mikita” should govern: “That which we know to be true but have agreed not to talk about...

...Most of us know that much, yet few also know another factor in the explosion: the kind of fuel TWA was using...

...Developed by the Excalibur Limousine Service in Brooklyn, it is 34 feet long, carries 18 passengers, and according to James Barmn of The New York Times, “gets about 5 miles to the gallon...

...Well, according to The Hill, Republica...

...One second-year resident told Fein, “The senior doctors are often just not here and there’s a real taboo about calling them at home when there’s a problem in the middle of the night...

...They don’t...

...TWA's FLIGHT 800 CRASHED because a spark ignited the center wing fuel tank...

...That’s what the law says in New York...

...When I first floated the idea, a young doctor told me that it might work except that some of the senior doctors were incompetent and out of date in their medical knowledge...

...Because getting people back into the habit of work is so important, this is bad news...

...MAYBE WE COULD ASK THE FORtunate fifth to sacrifice a few feet off the length of their yachts...

...But even that modest reform has been flouted...

...In New York, their average income is $132,390...

...When a history of makework is written, it may well prove that its great institutional pioneers were the hangers-on in legislative appendages such as the office of the Sergeant at Arms and the office of the Doorkeeper...

...Tripp has had several salary raises since she went to the Pentagon two years ago...

...The New York Times reports that sales of sailboats over 35 feet long rose 40 percent last year...

...Stevens’s nominee, Daniel T. Terra, was named by the Reagak administration to be “ambassador at large for cultural affairs” after he raised the $21 million for Reagan’s 1980 campaign...

...Given the way the rich are getting richer, we might even make the break point higher...

...But what, asks Keith Bradsher of The New York Times, is going to happen when the sport Utes are used and cheap enough to be bought by drunks and reckless adolescents...

...Why then did the White House arrange to have her hired at the Pentagon...

...But the starting figure doesn't tell half the story...

...The rate of visitor suicides in Atlantic City is double the national average...

...Remember, last year Starr wanted to get out of this job and go to California and enjoy the pleasures of Pepperdine College and the Pacific Coast...

...BY THE WAY, SPEAKING OF GENerous government pensions, did you notice the photograph in The New York Times of Betty Currie’s husband Robert, identified as a retired federal employee...

...THAT was the requirement in the welfare reform law that people on relief who can’t find regular jobs must do community service work which the states were supposed to arrange by Oct...

...New York City has 18,000 welfare recipients who, writes Whitman, “are now working off their grants 20 hours a week picking up trash, cleaning public parks and streets, answering phones, and the like...

...As a nation we sensed that it would be overkill to impeach Ronald Reagan for Iran Contra, and we expressed that sense through the decision by Lee Hamilton and Warren Rudman, who headed the Congressional inquiry, not to pursue the issue of Reagan’s guilt, even though his offenses were not personal but matters of state...

...DID YOU KNOW that nannies are in such great demand that they are now earning $35,000 a year, Gd, according to KnightRidder’s Michelle Quiiin, “more if they do some house chores...

...AS THEY WATCH THE NEW RUSSian business elite drive around Moscow in their Mercedes 600is flashing special passes that give them immunity from the police, the average Russian is saying, writes Christina Freeland of the Financial Times, “Everytl-ung Marx told us about communism was false but everything he told us about capitalism was true.’’ REMEMBER "WORKFARE...

...Hospitals in New York City often rely on exhausted and poorly supervised medical residents,” writes Esther Fein of The New York Times...

...Presiding is the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court...

...It is called “Jet A? It has a flash point of 86 degrees F at 13,800 feet, the altitude which Flight 800 had attained at the moment it exploded, below the estimated temperature of the vapors in the fuel tank...

...A recent letter to the Washington Post said it would be better to let evidence remain “murky” so we won’t have to decide whether to proceed with impeachment...

...David Phillips of the University of California at San Diego, suicide rates in Las Veps are four times the national average...

...This year there are two proposals for reform before the Congress, one by a Democrat, Ted Kennedy, another by a Republican, John Ashcroft...

...There were 12.1 million in 1996 and, as the Times reports, the boat yards have really been humming since then...

...His car is in the background...

...It’s called “turkey farming...

...News...

...IF YOU WANT SOMETHING ELSE to worry about, ponder the results of a survey conducted by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute...

...Only 26.7 percent of today’s college freshmen believe that “keeping up to date with political affairs” is an important life goal compared to 57.8 percent in 1966...

...At the time the “reform” struck me as absurdly modest...

...dence of perjury and of subornation of perjury by the president...

...SPEAKING OF TUNES, THAT deafening music that assails you in many restaurants is not a matter of chance...

...Ted Stevens also “sought a waiver to have a former ambassador buried in Arlington National Cemetery who had falsely claimed a military record, but had raised more than $21 million for the Republican Party...

...Advertising depicted drinking as glamorous...

...You will recall that these vapors had been heated by the air-conditioning units directly under the fuel tank, which had been running for three and a half hours due to delays before takeoff...

...One part of our brain feels that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it...

...And according to another study by Dr...

...His central passion, next to getting laid (or the alternative he is said to deem more permissible) is getting re-elected...

...They need their resumes to reek of success, not failure...

...Such work is not easy to arrange...

...Yet it is where the Starr investigation seems to be heading...

...At least Clinton’s man, Larry Lawrence, was an ambassador to a real country...

...As evidence mounts on the effects of the legalization of gambling, we have to admit that some of it casts doubt on a cause we support, the legalization of dope...

...My friend Molly Ivins says “I don’t care who he’s screwing, as long as it’s not the public...

...Residents say they worry about making mistakes because they routinely work more than the legal maximum of 80 hours a week and often have no senior doctors monitoring their diagnoses and treatments...

...And of course we allowed advertising from the beginning to lure young people into smoking...

...And it’s usually done because it’s easier than firing...

...But let’s abandon the notion that there must be some kind of legal adjudication of the case of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky...

...So I was delighted by a letter to the editor from a teacher named Milton Rouse that straightened out the libertarians at Time: “Requiring volunteer work is no more slavery than requiring that students do homework or run around a track during gym...

...So I suspect the greatest danger to Bill Clinton will come not from the Congress but from Ken Starr, or to be more precise, from Starr’s staff...

...According to the Wall Street Journal’s Andrea Peterson the ear-splitting sound is designed to keep out “the frumpy over-30 crowd” and to make diners eat faster so there will be more table turnover...

...But I was distinctly unimpressed by the mindless libertarianism of an attack on requiring volunteer service from high school students, which Time characterized as “slavery” in a December issue...

...There is likely to be eviHave you considered what an impeachmet trial would be like...

...THE WORST TAX IS OUR NAME for the social security payroll tax...

...As gambling has been legalized in the United States, the number of gambling addicts has increased by half, rising from .84 percent of adults to 1.29, according to a study by Harvard Medical School...

...But why permit such doctors to practice at all...

...Let’s hope enough of his colleagues wake up to the need to enact legislation that is effective in bringing relief to workers and that they are, in contrast to Ashcroft, realistic enough to find other revenue to replace what is lost...

...As I My friend Molly Ivins says,"I don't care who he's screwing, as long as it's not the public...

...One of the best ways to get a better job in government,” one official told the Post, “is for people to really need you to move out of the job you have...

...His total federal pension income in 1998 will be $125,976...

...A similar decision would be even wiser now...

...Few of us can work nearly that long without becoming glassy-eyed...

...Some are - the failure to pay competitive salaries to accountants has been a factor in the decline of the IRS - but many more, especially in the middle and upper-middle grades, are adequately or even generously compensated...

...They have to nail the president...

...One reason for this is inflated performance ratings...

...And Clinton has made some truly miserable appointments and doesn’t pay nearly enough attention to what’s going on down below in the federal government...

...BACK TO THOSE SPORT UTILITY vehicles, the latest development is a stretch version...

...Favorable job evaluations,” according to Amy Goldstein and Rene Sanchez of The Washington Post, “helped boost her salaryl’ She’s not alone: Three-quarters of the Pentagon’s 114 other public affairs employees are also rated “outstanding...

...In Maryland, it’s $147,971...

...Obviously not - people in any part of the government should care about having it all work well - but it happens all the time...

...But it’s good to have a Republican who at least sees that something must be done about the payroll tax...

...My own solution is a larger reduction than Kennedy proposes for income under $65,000 that would be financed by a larger increase on incomes over $65,000...

...Take former Congressman Hastings Keith, Whose civil service pension began at $1560 a month in 1973...

...But JPS is not used by commercial air lines...

...It is a latemodel Mercedes...

...This is why I have said that I would never support dope legalization that is not accompanied by a ban on advertising...

...But his staff rebelled...

...SPEAKING OF WASHINGTON insanity, did you know that the office of the Senate Sergeant at A r m s has a Director of Communications, Planning, and Policy...

...ONE OF WASHINGTON’S BESTkept secrets is the generosity of federal pensions, which are usually considerably better than those in privae business...

...PEOPLE IN CARS HIT BY ONE OF those sport-utility vehicles are four times more likely to die than the people in the sport Utes...

...I agree...

...Require the senior doctors, as a condition to their use of a hospital, to agree to serve a few nights a year not just to advise residents but to replace enough of them for long enough to give residents and interns a sane work schedule without the long stretches of sleeplessness that...

...He now gets $6,682 a month, thanks to the multiplying effect of annual cost-of-living adjustments...

...As far as I know his only allies are this magazine and the National Taxpayers’ Union...

...Americans are now spending 6 percent of the GNP on gambling, compared to the 8 percent they spend on groceries...

...Interest in programs to clean up the environment is down from 33.6 percent just five years ago to 19.4 percent today...

...HOSPITARLE SIDENT PHYSIcians should not work more than 80 hours a week...

...Having recruited them, how could he desert...

...He has abused his employees in more serious ways...

...But it can be done...

...REMEMBEHRO W OUTRAGED THE Republicans were because the Clinton administration had given an Arlington burial to a former ambassador and campaign contributor who had falsely claimed wartime service...

...TILTING AT WINDMILLS BY CHARLES PETERS Gambling Addicts Volunteer Slavery The Pentagon as Urkey Farm Clinton's Real Enemies The Rise of the Yachting Class KEN STARR HAS A RIVAL IN Orange County, California...

...It would be folly to impeach him for sexual behavior or lying about it or trying to get others to lie about it...

...The Navy uses another fuel, JPS, with a flash point that is higher than the temperature of Flight 800’s fuel tank...

...As a realistic matter, I think the best chance of avoiding impeachment lies in the Republicans realizing that they don’t want to give Gore a head start on 2000 by putting him in the White House now...

...It seems possible that that the short supply might not be unrelated to the scorn extreme feminists have expressed for the nurturing professions...

...Yet The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest reports: “In choosing aides de camp, Army leaders nearly always exclude female officers...

...In Connecticut, it’s $149,594...