The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.9           March 9, 1998 
 
 
The Great Society  

BY HARRY RING
We tossed all night - A new defense fund was authorized by William and Hillary Clinton to help raise the $3.2 million they owe their lawyers. The head trustee of the fund warned that if big money doesn't come in, "this couple will leave the White House impoverished."

Bleak Blair - Anthony Blair, the United Kingdom's Labour Party prime minister, said it would be two "tough" and "frustrating" years before there would be any visible benefits from his government's cutbacks of social entitlements. Not to mention the political fallout of serving as running dog in U.S. imperialism's dirty war against Iraq.

White citizens? - Thousands of immigrant workers and tourists in Israel were told not to join the long lines waiting for gas masks being issued, assertedly, in the event of an Iraqi attack. Due to a shortage, the masks are being distributed only to Israeli citizens.

`Sick,' as in `sick society' - In Johnson City, Tennessee, a school psychologist and her husband, a minister, were indicted for child abuse. On a cold rainy night they put their adopted son, 13, out naked as a punishment. He was found the next morning in a neighbor's barn, trembling with cold, and clad only in a choir robe he took from his father's nearby church.

It was pretty malodorous -The Holocaust Memorial Museum has fired the director who refused to take Palestine's Yasser Arafat on the VIP tour expended to visiting dignitaries.

They got squeezed? - "Besieged" officials at Nicholas High in Fullerton, California, modified their ban on hugging and other on-campus displays of affection. "Some" hugs and even "high fives" are now OK. But they drew a line in the sand. Declared an administrator: "This is a place of business. Sometimes it's appropriate to hug... [but] making out in the bushes, that's not appropriate."

`How I spent my holiday' - A U.S. bounty hunter is offering British vacationers the chance to spend their holiday pursuing and arresting bail jumpers ($1,480 a week and no share of the bounty paid by bail bondsmen). Recruits will be given black uniforms, bulletproof vests, and a pistol. "When you kick in the door," he observed, "you never know what's going to happen."

...nor does the victim - In the Los Angeles area, two bounty hunters acting to seize an alleged bail jumper, shot a bystander through the chest, leaving him in critical condition. Police took the targeted man into custody, but released the bounty hunters after brief questioning. They said it was an accident, "not a criminal act."  
 
 
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