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Washington Monthly, March, 1998 by Charles Peters

Ken Starr has a rival in Orange County, California. 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. "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."

"Hospital resident physicians should not work more than 80 hours a week" That's what the law says in New York. 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. At the time the "reform" struck me as absurdly modest. Few of us can work nearly that long without becoming glassy-eyed.

But even that modest reform has been flouted. "Hospitals in New York City often rely on exhausted and poorly supervised medical residents," writes Esther Fein of The New York Times. "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." 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."

The monthly has a solution to this one. 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 are now so common.

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floated the idea, a young doctor told me that it might work except that some of the senior doctors were incompetent and out of date in their medical knowledge. But why permit such doctors to practice at all?

Did you know that nannies are in such great demand that they are now earning $35,000 a year, and, according to Knight-Ridder's Michelle Quinn, "more if they do some house chores"? It seems possible that that the short supply might not be unrelated to the scorn extreme feminists have expressed for the nurturing professions. Now that they're desperate for someone to care for little Jennifer and Jason, I'll bet many of them have changed their tune.

Speaking of tunes, that deafening music that assails you in many restaurants is not a matter of chance. 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.

Remember how 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? Well, according to The Hill, Republican Sen. 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." At least Clinton's man, Larry Lawrence, was an ambassador to a real country. Stevens's nominee, Daniel J. Terra, was named by the Reagan administration to be "ambassador at large for cultural affairs" after he raised the $21 million for Reagan's 1980 campaign.

Okay so what do we think about the Lewinsky hullaballoo? My friend Molly Ivins says "I don't care who he's screwing, as long as it's not the public" I agree. 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. He has abused his employees in more serious ways. Consider the case of Vince Foster. As I 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 While House, on their private legal business. 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. He's made the bureaucracy a lot leaner, but not a lot better. His central passion, next to getting laid (or the alternative he is said to deem more permissible) is getting re-elected. Still, his policy choices have been good enough that I'm convinced history will rank him in the upper half of American presidents.

It would be folly to impeach him for sexual behavior or lying about it or trying to get others to lie about it. These actions may diminish our respect for him as a person, but as Molly says, they don't screw the American people.

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