House Call
USA
Today leads with the tough prison sentence given to an ex-aide to Mike
Espy and what it might mean to the dramatis personae of the Clinton sex
scandal. The Washington Post leads with word that Newt Gingrich and
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde agreed yesterday to form a small
group of House members that would check to see if Kenneth Starr's investigation
has accumulated evidence of an impeachable offense. The national edition of the
New York Times
goes with the conclusion by a panel of educational experts that both
old-fashioned phonics and new-fashioned "whole-language" methods are valuable
for teaching reading. The metro edition of the Times leads with the
unanimous decision by the New York City Board of Education to require
elementary school kids to wear uniforms. The top national story in the metro
edition is the president's criticism of the GOP budget. The Los Angeles
Times lead continues the close look the paper has been taking lately at
local and state prisons. On the heels of indictments of prison officials in
connection with an inmate death at Corcoran prison, the paper reports that
federal investigators are now looking into assaults and slayings of inmates at
two other state facilities.
The judge in the Espy aide case ignored the sentencing guideline
recommendation of probation to hand down a 27-month sentence for lying, and
while doing so, referred darkly to a "Hollywood" lawyer and others who have
suggested that lying under oath in a civil case isn't a big deal. USAT
implies the "Hollywood" tag was meant to refer to Monica Lewinsky's Los
Angeles-based lawyer, William Ginsburg. The paper concludes the judge wanted to
"send a message to key players in the White House intern scandal." The sentence
is also covered inside at the WP .
According to the Post , the House select group agreed to by Gingrich and Hyde would
include Democrats and will probably examine Starr's evidence at Starr's office
to avoid the leaky consequences of the House of Representatives rule making
material in the files of any standing committee available to any member.
The NYT reports that President Clinton used sharply partisan language
in knocking the Republican budget before a cheering,
sympathetic crowd of AFL-CIO members in Las Vegas, saying it "shortchanges our
nation's future," by eliminating his new initiatives on education, job training
and child care. Meanwhile, back in Washington, reports the Times , the
Senate Budget Committee approved the Republican tax and spending plan on a
straight party-line vote, after defeating several Democratic attempts to
reinstate the Clinton initiatives. The Clinton speech also gets front space at
the WP .
The Wall Street Journal "Business Bulletin" reports that it
takes about six years for a new consumer product to take off. That probably
seems long to investors, but, says the Journal , before World War II it
took about eighteen years.
A Clinton White House executive order from a few years back requires the CIA
and other government agencies to release every classified document in the
archives that's more than 25 years-old. A WSJ front-page feature
visits the CIA facility that's doing the declassification
work, editing out sensitive information line by line. And it's a lot of
work--there are 65 million pages to review. Where's the facility? That's a
secret .
Right now, the press is in a big respectability-puffing, nose-holding phase
in its reporting of the Clinton sex scandals, deploring--in exquisite
detail--having to cover all that executive branch breastage and groinage. A
good clue to how insincere that all is comes in a letter to the WP . "The press coverage of Monica
Lewinsky and her problems," a reader notes, "has mentioned little or nothing
about the [White House] intern program in which she was employed." Here at last
is a legitimate story related to the scandals that's not itself salacious--so
of course, it hasn't been done.
