Funds and Games
At the Washington Post and New York Times ,
scandalous political fund-raising leads. At the Los Angeles
Times , it's news of dramatic drops in California welfare rolls.
USA
Today 's top story is that a presidential commission is warning that the
nation's public and private computer systems are gravely vulnerable to
cyber-sabotage.
The cyber-commission's findings won't be handed in until Monday, but
USAT says they include such measures as establishing a center for
collecting information about all computer security breaches and creating a
White House office to coordinate all the government's computer security
efforts. Former Sen. Sam Nunn tells the paper that the issue is right up there
with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons security.
The NYT 's lead reports that President Clinton denies that the coffee
tapes mandated the appointment of an outside counsel and repeats that the
failure to turn over the tapes in a more timely manner was a "simple mistake,
not deliberate defiance." The president also says that Republicans are using
the tapes to divert attention from their defeat of the McCain-Feingold reform
bill. Clinton made these remarks before embarking on a campaign fundraising
swing through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, made necessary in part by the large
number of contributions to the DNC during the last election cycle that had to
be returned because they proved questionable. Meanwhile says the Times
and the other majors, at the Thompson hearings, former senior WH aide Harold
Ickes also staunchly defended Clinton campaign finance practices.
The Post 's campaign finance lead is that a Pennsylvania landfill
company has pleaded guilty to funneling $129,000 in illegal corporate donations
to ten political candidates--including the presidential campaigns of Clinton
and Bob Dole--and agreed to pay a record $8 million fine. The scam here was the
disguising of company donations as individual donations. The Dole and Clinton
officials involved state that they had no reason to believe that the purported
individual $1,000 donations weren't legit, even though some came from
secretaries and clerks.
The NYT reports that today, the Clinton administration will announce
that it has persuaded handgun manufacturers to provide child-safety locks with
all their products. Accidental shootings, says the paper, killed 185 children
in 1994.
All the majors give front-page space to Alan Greenspan's inflation warning
yesterday--and to the downward spiral it predictably caused in the financial
markets. In recent testimony, the fed chairman had suggested that the American
economy has entered some new sort of anti-inflationary era where tremendous
increases in productivity enable companies to absorb cost increases they would
have formerly passed along as price increases. But yesterday, Greenspan
returned to a straightforward reading of the Phillips curve: increased
employment leads to higher wages, which leads to higher prices.
USAT reports that flu shots drive down business absenteeism and
health-care costs so much that companies are starting to entice and pressure
their employees to get them. Eastman Kodak, for instance, says the shots saved
$2.8 million in absenteeism just last year. But even though the company gives
the shots for free, 70 percent of its employees "won't take one in the deltoid
for the team." The leading causes of worker reticence seem to be fear of
getting the flu from the shots and fear of needles.
The WP has word that a Dutch study today reports that when people
stop smoking, overall health costs decline only in the short term, and after 15
years, actually increase. Look for this study to be used by tobacco
manufacturers in an attempt to whittle the cost of any state or national
tobacco deal, even though it merely illustrates the truism that dying of old
age is the most expensive way to go. After all, issuing handguns to all
teenagers would cut overall health care costs too.
How have recent meat health scares affected the restaurant business? Well,
according to the Wall Street Journal , you can still get a rare hamburger at
the Mountain Mist Ice Cream stand in Saranac Lake, N.Y.--but you do have to
sign a liability waiver first.
