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| Newt Gingrich |
Newt Gingrich admitted that he violated House ethics rules. An ethics committee report says Gingrich channeled tax-exempt funds to a college course that was tied to his political action committee and was described to donors as a tool for recruiting Republican candidates and volunteers. Gingrich also admitted that he gave the ethics committee "inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable statements" about the relationship between the PAC and the course. Gingrich blamed his lawyer and said he had signed the false statements without reading them. He denied having seen a letter from the PAC's lawyer that warned him not to violate the law by mixing his political and tax-exempt organizations. A few conservatives, led by William Safire, called on Gingrich to step down, so as not to distract attention from President Clinton's ethical troubles and from the Republican policy agenda. The betting line so far is that Gingrich will be re-elected. Pundit chess masters theorize that the Democrats' gloating pursuit of Gingrich could backfire in two ways: 1) It irks Republicans and stiffens their resolve to defend him; and 2) If Gingrich goes, Democrats lose their best election-year bogeyman. Pundit chess grandmasters agree with both conclusions but theorize that Democrats are shrewdly combining them in a diabolical scheme: to keep Gingrich in office by bullying the Republicans into saving him. (posted 12/31) | | A major snowstorm hit the Pacific Northwest, including Seattle, home of S |
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LATE. Or, at least, the locals seemed to regard it as a major snowstorm, and the national press accepted that categorization. (posted 12/31)| The American media decided that the Tupac Amaru guerrillas holding hostages at the Japanese Embassy in Lima, Peru, aren't so bad after all. Each day brings a new hostage release (only 83 of the original 400 or so remain). The guerrillas are modifying their demands and have stopped threatening to kill the remaining captives any time soon. Newspaper reports increasingly tout the guerrillas as reasonable fellows (in contrast to the rival Shining Path rebel movement), while portraying Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori as snappish, aloof, pugnacious, and intransigent. The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post turned their attention to the Peruvian government's "draconian" treatment of the guerrillas' jailed comrades. The New York Times faulted Fujimori for neglecting the poor and called the guerrillas' hostage-taking raid "quaint, even evocative" of "revolutionary crusades of days gone by." Everyone now expects a peaceful resolution of the standoff. (posted 12/31) |
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| Christmas sales turned out not to be as good as early figures had suggested. The main reason cited was the shortened shopping season (five fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas). Also noted: consumers' increasing habit of waiting for post-holiday markdowns. These were plentiful last year, when overoptimistic retailers piled up excess inventory. This year the story was the opposite: Twice-shy retailers kept inventories low, and customers couldn't find what they wanted. (posted 12/31) |
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| This year's post-Christmas toy horror story is the Cabbage Patch Snack Time Kid doll. Designed to munch plastic french fries and lacking an on-off switch, the doll has reportedly devoured the hair of at least six girls since Christmas. In some cases, medical personnel were called in to subdue the doll or cut the child free. "Doll Goes Haywire, Chews Hair," screamed the Associated Press. A Mattel spokeswoman insisted the munchings were "isolated incidents."(posted 12/31) |
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| "Ebonics," a program authorized by the Oakland school board to train teachers to recognize black English as a second language, triggered a national uproar. "Ax" would be translated as "ask"; "I be," as "I am." Much of the debate mirrors the bilingual education controversy: Critics say ebonics would impede kids from learning the proper English necessary to succeed professionally; defenders say kids' native patois would merely be a basis for learning proper English. The school board added to the controversy by claiming--contrary to much scholarship--that ebonics is "genetically based" on African dialects. Conservatives pounced on ebonics as Afrocentrism and multiculturalism run amok. At first, established black leaders and pundits (including Jesse Jackson) also denounced it as self-segregation and "teaching down." Cynics speculated that ebonics was just a scheme to get federal bilingual education money; the Clinton administration quickly ruled that out. Eventually, Jackson backed off and endorsed "building a bridge" to jive-speaking kids, while other black pundits began to complain that the program had been cavalierly dismissed and caricatured. (posted 12/31) |
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| Jaguars in action |
Expansion teams are shaking up the National Football League playoffs. The Carolina Panthers, with just two years' supply of draft picks and free agents, whipped the venerable San Francisco 49ers to win their division and will host the Dallas Cowboys in the conference semifinals. Even so, the Panthers are now losing their Cinderella distinction to the Jacksonville Jaguars, the league's other two-year-old franchise. The Jaguars, a crew of castoffs and career backups, clawed their way out of the cellar by winning the last five games of the season, benefiting from an absurd and absolutely necessary combination of losses by rival teams. They squeaked into the playoffs on a freak botched field goal by an enemy kicker who hadn't missed from close range in 60 tries, and then ousted the veteran Buffalo Bills--who hadn't lost a playoff game at home in nine contests--on a final field-goal attempt that struck the right post and bounced through. (posted 12/31) | | California Rep. Bob Dornan gained some measure of vindication for blaming his Nov. 5 defeat on illegal votes cast by Hispanic noncitizens. The Los Angeles Times reported that a Latino civil-rights group had indeed evidently recruited not-yet-naturalized residents to vote against Dornan. He lost by 984 votes; the Times verified only 19 illegal votes in the entire county--including his district. (posted 12/31) |
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| Alexander Lebed |
Former Russian national security chief Alexander Lebed announced that he is launching a new political party to challenge "the extreme right and the extreme left"--the Communists on one hand and President Boris Yeltsin's "democratic apparatchiks" on the other. The announcement was widely viewed as a de facto declaration of Lebed's presidential candidacy for 2000. Analysts agreed that he is still the country's most beloved politician and can exploit popular yearning for a return to order without tyranny. But he trails two other would-be Yeltsin successors--Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov--in raising money and building a political organization. (posted 12/31) | | Straws in the wind: After closing the racial gap in previous decades, blacks and Hispanics are falling farther behind whites on a national student-achievement test. The Justice Department says cross burnings are rapidly increasing and now occur in all regions of the country. A new government study ranks the United States first in the developed world in the rate of sexually transmitted diseases. Another study shows that Shakespeare and other great writers are vanishing from required-course lists for college English majors, mostly because professors prefer to teach the pop-culture courses for which students are clamoring. Judges are using the recent Supreme Court ruling against exorbitant punitive damages ($2 million to a BMW owner whose car had a bum paint job) as justification to slash damage awards around the country. Bagels have multiplied their sales fivefold in three years, tripled their market share in the breakfast food industry, and are now being anointed (by a white-collar customer quoted in the New York Times) "the yuppie food of the '90s."Cigars have become so popular in San Francisco (particularly among women) that the city is discouraging their use by putting up posters and television ads comparing them to dog droppings. Jesus-oriented air fresheners are now the hot automobile accessory, pleasing manufacturers who point out that they don't need "a licensing agreement to sell Jesus."(posted 12/31) |
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| Miscellany: Arkansas governor-turned-Whitewater-convict Jim Guy Tucker got a new liver on Christmas Day, after having been sentenced to probation instead of prison on account of his chronic liver disease. Kiss, the '70s band whose members (now in their late 40s) reunited this year to tour the country in their original heavy-metal makeup, ended up topping the concert-tour earnings list at $43 million. The State Department scolded Singapore's government for threatening to take away housing programs if residents voted for the opposition; Singapore's foreign ministry angrily replied, "In the U.S. the use of political advertisements to scare voters with the prospect of losing health and welfare entitlements if they should vote for the wrong party has been honed to a fine art."(posted 12/31) |
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Photograph of Newt Gingrich by John Kuntz/Reuters; photograph of the Jacksonville Jaguars beating the Buffalo Bills by Al McCracken Jr./Reuters; photograph of Alexander Lebed by Yuri Gripas/Reuters
Compiled by William Saletan and the editors of S LATE.
