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Politics : Clinton -- doomed & wagging, Japan collapses, Y2K bug, etc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lucky Lady who wrote (59)	9/2/1998 5:02:00 PM
From: cuemaster	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1151

The speech he wanted to give...and should have. "Members of Congress...people of America....I banged her. I banged her like a cheap gong. Which is not news, folks, because if you think Monica Lewinsky was the only skin flute player in my orchestra, you haven't been paying attention. The only babes in D.C. I haven't tried to do are the First Lady, Reno, Albright, and Shalala, mostly because they're a little older than I like and they have legs that former Houston Oiler Earl Campbell would envy. Which isn't to say I don't appreciate Hillary...I do. If not for the ice-water coursing through her veins, I'd be pumping gas into farm equipment in Hope, Arkansas, and she'd be married to the President. "So, let me set the record straight. I dodged the draft, hid FBI files, smoked dope, flipped Whitewater property, set up a new Korean wing in the White House, fired the travel staff, paid hush money to Hubbell, sold the Lincoln bedroom like an upscale Motel 6, and grabbed every ass that entered the Oval Office. Got it? Good. "Six years ago, there's not a man, woman, or child who didn't know I was as horny as Woody Allen. But, you elected me anyway, which turned out to be a good move on your part. Your other choice was Bush, an aging baseball player and part-time resident of some place called "Kennebunkport" who thought he could bomb his way into the White House. Before him, it was Reagan, who left the office with the same Alzheimer's he came in with. "There was Carter before him who brought you a 17% prime interest rate, smiling the whole time like his lithium drip had just kicked in. Nixon before that coined, but never really understood, the concept of 'plausible deniability,' and got a one-way ticket to San Clemente for his crackerjack style of governing. Johnson was an inbred, power-mad war criminal whose major contribution to American society was Agent Orange. And John Kennedy, who was a little naughty himself, didn't hang around long enough for America to spot that curious atavistic tic for "beaver-wrestling" shared by at least a dozen former residents of the White House. "Which brings me back to my point. Since I have been strumming the banjo here at the White House, government is doing more for less. The budget is balanced for the first time since JFK did a one gun salute to Marilyn, a fact the press didn't seem to care about, evidently. Unemployment is so low today a blind felon can get a job as a night watchman. And the stock market is higher than a D-student on a full gram of dumb-dust, and anyone with a degree from a junior college who can spell 'internet' has enough money to ponder the annual maintenance cost of his boat, instead of where his or her next meal is coming from. "Bottom line: I'm running a country here and I'm doing it with my pecker showing. What I'm asking for is your support, not a date with your daughter ... unless, of course, she's a hotty with thin ankles, and then I'd like to discuss it. In the meantime, think about where you are today and what kind of life you're living before you get too interested in where I'm parking the Presidential limousine. Thank you, good night and God bless America."

To: Lucky Lady who wrote (59)	9/2/1998 8:00:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

Dear Lady, I am aware of this. Can't decide if it is God's sense of humor or Satan's "in your face" attitude that is responsible for the name. Anyway -- the most telling line is: "and with more sensitive applications, without biometric authentication like hand geometry scanners -- the card won't work in the hands of anybody but it's owner" I don't know when or exactly what the final technology will be, but you can be certain there will be a "reading" of the hand or perhaps the iris (its location is very near the forehead). Of course, the masses will flock to this because it will be "saving" their lives. I remain, SOROS ps As in the days of Noah, most are not aware of any of the signs around them. If one is brought to their conscious mind, they quickly dismiss it as a useless, or religious fanatic thought.

To: Lucky Lady who wrote (59)	9/2/1998 8:10:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

Chicago Tribune Americans have never voted to establish a national identity card, and you'd have to look far and wide to find any politician who ever got elected by promising to do so. But while Americans weren't looking, they were being transported halfway toward such a document. And a new proposal by the Clinton administration threatens to take us a good ways further. That is a development that should worry anyone concerned about protecting personal privacy and limiting government control over our lives. The Department of Transportation has drafted regulations that would effectively require all 50 states to put Social Security numbers on driver's licenses. DOT has to act because in the 1996 immigration bill, Congress ordered measures to make driver's licenses a better document for verifying identity. The idea was to combat illegal immigration by making it harder for undocumented foreigners to obtain phony citizenship documents. Under the DOT rule, a driver's license would not be accepted for identification purposes by federal agencies unless it contains your Social Security number. These numbers were emphatically not supposed to be used for identification when the retirement system was created. But over the years, they have become the most common method of establishing identity. What's wrong with that? One big problem is that it facilitates "identity theft." If a crook knows your name and your Social Security number, he has a good chance of being able to get credit by pretending to be you. Another problem is that it makes it easier for people to compile information about you from a variety of sources that all rely on the same means of identification. Some privacy experts think the battle to restrict the proliferation of uses for Social Security numbers is hopeless. They have a point: Many states, including Illinois, already put them on driver's licenses. But critics spanning the ideological spectrum have united in opposing the DOT proposal for making a bad situation worse. Before long, it may be impossible to apply for Medicare, open a bank account, get a passport, get on an airplane or do any number of other things without producing a driver's license with a Social Security number-without showing what amounts to your national ID card. It's not clear that the change would do much to stop illegal immigration. But even if it would, Americans ought to ask whether that potential benefit is worth the risks it raises.

To: Lucky Lady who wrote (59)	9/2/1998 8:17:00 PM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

Phyllis Schlafly August 19, 1998 Americans were outraged to learn about the Federal Government's plans to assign a personal identification number to every medical patient. But Congress nevertheless passed H.R. 4250, the so-called Patient Protection Act, which allows anyone who maintains your personal medical records to gather, exchange and distribute them. The only condition on distribution is that the information be used for "health care operations," which is a vague and meaningless limitation that does not even exclude marketing. Even worse, H.R. 4250 preempts state laws that currently protect patients from unauthorized distribution of their medical records. While the sponsors of H.R. 4250 claim that they did not intend for the information to be circulated for "just anything," their spokesman confirmed that personal medical records would be used for future programs concerning health quality and disease management. When the Kennedy-Kassebaum law was passed in 1996, we were told it was to improve access to health insurance. The law became explosively controversial last month when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began to implement the Kennedy-Kassebaum "unique health care identifiers" so that government can electronically tag, track and monitor every citizen's personal medical records. After this news broke on July 18, embarrassed Congressmen inserted a line in H.R. 4250, which passed July 24, ordering HHS not to promulgate "a final standard" without Congressional authorization. That language is a total phony; it doesn't prevent HHS from issuing proposed or interim standards (which will become de facto standards) or from collecting medical data. So much money is involved in accessing and controlling personal information that the Washington lobbyists are moving rapidly to lock in the extraordinary powers conferred by the Kennedy-Kassebaum law. That explains these sneaky eleventh-hour inserts in pending legislation. On August 4, the House passed yet another bill to protect the gathering of personal information on private citizens. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, there they go again. Just before passing H.R. 2281, a bill about copyrights on the Internet, the House quietly attached a separate and dangerous bill deceptively entitled the "Collections of Information Antipiracy Act." No one, of course, is in favor of "piracy," but the impact of this bill goes far beyond any reasonable definition of piracy. By the legerdemain of inserting it in another bill, it will go straight to a House-Senate conference committee under a procedure designed to avoid debate or amendments in the Senate. This Collections of Information bill (now part of H.R. 2281), in effect, creates a new federal property right to own, manage and control personal information about you, including your name, address, telephone number, medical records, and "any other intangible material capable of being collected and organized in a systematic way." This new property right provides a powerful incentive for corporations to build nationwide databases of the personal medical information envisioned by the Kennedy-Kassebaum law and the Patient Protection bill. Under the Collections of Information bill, any information about you can be owned and controlled by others under protection of Federal law. Your medical chart detailing your visits to your doctor, for example, would suddenly become the federally protected property of other persons or corporations, and their rights (not your rights) would be protected by Federal police power. This bill will encourage health care corporations to assign a unique national health identifier to each patient. The government can then simply agree to use a privately-assigned national identifier, and Clinton's longtime goal of government control of health care will be achieved. This bill creates a new federal crime that penalizes a first offense by a fine of up to $250,000 or imprisonment for up to 5 years, or both, for interfering with this new property right. It even authorizes Federal judges to order seizure of property before a finding of wrongdoing. H.R. 2281 grants these new Federal rights only to private databases, and pretends to exclude the government's own efforts to collect information about citizens. But a loophole in the bill permits private firms to share their Federally protected data with the government so long as the information is not collected under a specific government agency or license agreement. This loophole will encourage corporations, foundations, Washington insiders and political donors, to build massive databases of citizens' medical and other personal records, and then share that data with the government. And, under the House-passed bill cynically called the Patient Protection Act, patients would be unable to invoke state privacy laws to protect their personal records. Meanwhile, in another aspect of the Federal takeover of all Americans' health care, the Centers for Disease Control is aggressively building a national database of all children's medical records through the ruse of tracking immunizations. Tell your Congressman and Senators you won't vote for them in the upcoming elections unless they immediately stop all Federal plans to track and monitor our health or immunization records.

To: Lucky Lady who wrote (59)	9/4/1998 9:02:00 AM
From: SOROS	Respond to of 1151

BBC - 09/04/98 The rouble continued its downward spiral on Friday despite Prime Minister-designate Victor Chernomyrdin's vow to take a firm grip on the country's ailing financial system by introducing an "economic dictatorship". The rouble is now trading at around 17 to one US dollar, down from 13.46 on Thursday. Mr Chernomyrdin wants to impose strict financial controls in a desperate attempt to bring the country's economy back from the abyss. He hopes to stem the decline in the rouble by harnessing the currency to the country's gold and foreign currency reserves. But the rouble will still be allowed to float on the world's foreign exchange markets, which could leave it at the mercy of international speculators. Further crackdowns on tax dodgers, forcing them to pay the government what they owe, will be introduced and firms may be pushed into bankruptcy if they cannot conform to new government controls. Mr Chernomyrdin is also planning to use scarce foreign currency reserves and print more roubles to pay mounting government debts, which include a huge backlog of wages and pensions to public sector workers. But Mr Chernomyrdin could be denied the chance to implement the sweeping reforms. He faces an uphill struggle to be elected as Russia's new Prime Minister and seems certain to be rejected again by the Duma, Russia's lower parliament. Meanwhile the Russian currency continues free fall. Ordinary Russians have been hardest hit by the currency collapse, which has caused the price of imports and food to soar. On the streets of the capital it takes 18 or 19 roubles to buy one dollar. The rouble has lost more than 60% of its value since the central bank abandoned the currency's peg to the US dollar nearly three weeks ago. More and more Russians are trying to convert their rouble pay and savings into dollars, but the US currency is in short supply. Many private exchange offices have run out of greenbacks, and Muscovites are chasing from bank to bank hoping to snap up the dollars available. With the currency markets in shambles and foreign investors fleeing or sitting tight, there is hardly any trading on the Moscow stock exchange. Share prices fell to another historic low on Friday. The RTS index fell another 1% to 60.79 in early trading. In neighbouring Belarus, the economic situation is even worse, with the Belarus rouble losing half its value within the past three days.