Friday, January 23, 1998

The Swiss Supreme Court orders a motorist to pay a prostitute he ran over for loss of earnings.

The Unabomber's guilty plea includes a provision in which he gives up his right to appeal. Can that be constitutional?

A Florida judge orders a man w/HIV who had sex with a 16-yr old when he was 18, big deal, to get written consent before having sex.

So after all that talk about the pope's visit to Cuba being the Beginning of the End, what the pope really wanted to talk about was abortion and divorce. Who ever thought he was interested in democracy, anyway? They must not have been paying attention the last 20 years.

OK, back to the Clinton sex scandal of the week. Evidently Starr offered Tripp immunity solely on account of her taping Lewinsky illegally. Which is interesting, because he can't just waive Maryland's laws like that. Now just because the tapes were made illegally evidently doesn't mean Starr can't use them, because they weren't illegal under federal law.

So how did the Whitewater (remember that?) prosecutor wind up with control of this investigation as well? Evidently because he was already investigating Vernon Jordan for getting a job for Webster Hubbell, and now Jordan has gotten a job for Lewinsky (at Revlon! At least it wasn't for Paula Jones.). All of which makes Starr sound even more weaselly than Clinton.

The Slate notes the one thing absent in Clinton's semi-denial denial on MacNeil-Lehrer: any sense of outrage, such as an innocent man wrongly accused might have exhibited.

As I understand it, Tripp was previously working on an anti-Clinton book, dropped it, and has spent part of this week negotiating a contract for it. Her literary agent, according to Al Kamen of the Post, is a woman who in 1972 acted as a spy inside the McGovern campaign, where she posed as a reporter, for the RNC for $1,000 a week.

Nightline suggested that the particular weasel words Clinton's been using indicate that what he does with all these women is oral sex (well, has done to him), and that to him, that doesn't count. That's two images in this paragraph that you really didn't need to have in your head.

Saddam Hussein must be laughing his ass off.

What must Arafat have thought as he sat next to Clinton as he answered all those questions?

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