Hillary is throwing a huge party in Washington and this is one gig we may all want to watch. This time, it's a New Years eve party. She seems to think they will be celebrating the entering of a new century. But never mind that part. We are not going to tell Washington that a century has 100 years, not 99.

Anyway, the reason this New Years eve party may be great fun to watch is because it looks like there may be a lot of unexpected fireworks. You see, they'll need things like lights and water to make this a happening, and the District of Columbia is not sure either will be available. So, we're hoping that C-SPAN has battery operated cameras so we can watch Hillary blow a fuse and rant, rave, cuss and throw things at people, live and in color, on national television.

According to the Washington Post in a June 28 report, the District government recognizes that its Y2K repair program is not likely to be completed on time. So, they plan a massive New Years eve mobilization of emergency personnel and staff to ensure that critical city services are not interrupted if computer systems fail.

Rather than partying, the city's police will be stationed at more than 120 locations across the city, working 12-hour shifts, to take walk-in requests for emergency services. Twenty-one "warming centers," supplied with food, water and beds, will open. School crossing guards will be on call, ready to replace traffic lights at major intersections. And D.C. General Hospital will have 175 extra staff working.

"Our intent is not to alarm people, but put people at ease that things are under control," Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) said. "We are going to have this city work for people."

Commander David B. McDonald, the supervisor of police Y2K planning, added: "We want to reassure the residents and visitors to the District that even if Armageddon comes, we will assist and protect the public."

How comforting. The people may have no electricity, water or heat, but over at the White House they'll (try to) celebrate. This is the typical Democratic "let them eat cake" approach to government, apparently.

As the Washington Post reports: Of the city's 73 agencies, 19 -- including key departments such as Health, Housing and Community Development; Tax and Revenue; Child and Family Services; and Public Works -- are not even halfway done with their year Y2K repairs and planning.

Which means, they will not be working. Congress gave the District $62 million in emergency funding to help pay for the work. The District hired more than 300 consultants and budgeted a total of $76 million. But, they didn't start in time. So, there is an excellent chance the nation's capitol will go dark on New Years eve.

The D.C. General Hospital is only 48% ready. Even their pagers will not work. Eighty percent of the 1,000 pagers assigned to staff at D.C. General and other divisions of the city's hospital and health care network are not Y2K compatible. Ditto for most of the patient monitoring equipment and the patient records computer.

Actually, the phone company says they are 98% certain it won't go down. The power companies say they are 99% certain everything will work. But, the city administration apparently does not believe them. So, they are calling in the Red Cross and the National Guard. And, as an attempt to keep some services going, the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority is spending more than $1-million to rent several locomotive-size generators to ensure that water will flow if the electricity goes out. City officials are also urging residents to prepare for the new year by stocking up on food, fuel, bottled water and other supplies as they would for a winter storm.

At the end of June, the Department of Health was only 25% ready, the Department of Housing and Community Development 25%, the Real Estate Services Branch 25%, the D.C. Housing Authority 40%, Department of Public Works 45%, D.C. Health and Hospitals/Public Benefits Corp. 48%, Telecommunications 48%, D.C. Public Schools 50%, University of the District of Columbia 50%, Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs 50%, D.C. National Guard 60%, Energy Office 65%, Metropolitan Police Department 65%, Emergency Management 70%, Water and Sewer Authority 80%, Office of the Chief Technology Officer 80%, and Doug Fiedor 100%.

So, because the District government is negligent, slow and can't pay attention very well, they are asking the federal government for an additional $75 million in emergency funds -- tax money from people who live in the States.

And that's why the administration's Millennium celebration (a year early), may be great fun to watch.

Some educational concepts were tried, tested and conclusively proven effective over half a century ago. So, it's difficult to understand why today's liberal education establishment dropped them.

Teaching English in school seems like a no brainer. We live in an English speaking country. Everyone living here needs to know English. It's as simple as that. Yet, some in the educational establishment decided to teach every immigrant kid in their original language and English as only a second language. Consequently, there are many thousands of immigrant kids living in this country who know very little English.

Last year, via a state wide referendum, the people of California protested. Well, the startling (to liberals) results are starting to pour in. Now, former bilingual education students are learning English faster in English-only classrooms than almost anyone predicted. And, that is the conclusion today, not just of bilingual education opponents, but of many formerly pro-bilingual teachers, according to reports.

One Orange County teacher who once taught and supported bilingual classes describes her first-grade students as "little sponges" who "absorb everything." She says that her 20 "English-deficient" students add and subtract, read, write and speak in English, much to her surprise.

This is quite a concept for liberals to accept, actually. Kids learn languages very quickly, and there were hundreds of instances of this back in my old neighborhood. Back then, our teachers said we shall learn English, and so we did. When Mrs. Sharon said we must learn to diagram a sentence (yuk!), that order included everyone in the large class, including those who had only been in the country six months to a year. To not do it correctly was to fail the class. No exceptions were made. The correction, back then, was called summer school.

So, this year, it's no real surprise that more immigrant parents than expected are choosing to keep their children in English-only classes rather than exploit a silly loophole in the California law that would let them put their kids back in bilingual classes. In fact, when asked, fewer than 10 percent of parents in Los Angeles who were eligible to do so under the loophole wanted their kids back in bilingual classes.

Another interesting development also occurred: The new law included $50 million a year funding for adult English classes and they too have become extremely popular with parents.

However, there are always nay-sayers around. These seem to be located around the socialist capitol of San Francisco. San Francisco and a couple other districts skirted the law and refused to disband bilingual classes. Apparently, those school districts cannot deal with success.

Now comes the people of Arizona. The silly bilingual education movement originated in Arizona back in the 1960s. And, although the State sinks $70 million into the program annually, legislators say bilingual instruction works for only 7% of students. So, Arizona legislators are fed up with the failures of bilingual education and are considering bills to reform it.

The chairman of the State Senate's education committee calls it "mass-production criminality." "On average, you have a baby-sitting exercise taking place," said Republican state Sen. John Huppenthal.

For instance, the Tucson school district has 12,000 students in bilingual classrooms. Yet, only 3.2% of them learned enough English last year to be reclassified as fluent and moved into mainstream classes.

The people of Arizona figured out that bilingual education is little more than a big, feel-good liberal scam. A petition drive, started by a teacher, is underway for a referendum to abolish bilingual education altogether.

Hector Ayala, a high school English teacher in Tucson, started the statewide campaign called "English for the Children." Modeled after California's successful Proposition 227, the Arizona movement hopes to abolish bilingual education in November 2000. "Mexican students are dropping out at over twice the rate of Anglos," Ayala said. "They're generally reading at a third-grade level [in high school]."

State Senator Joe Eddie Lopez (D), a former union organizer and one-time aide to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, wants to salvage bilingual education and keep the children ignorant. He's still floating that old "throw more money at the problem" liberal canard. Among other things, Lopez wants more money to hire skilled bilingual teachers and to monitor the progress of bilingual students. He is also demanding $2,000 raises for bilingual teachers.

Rewarding failure seems to be the liberal way.

All business of all governments and branches of governments in the United States should be conducted exclusively in English. Furthermore, a working knowledge of English should be a requirement for everything from citizenship to driving a vehicle. Other languages should be taught in government schools, but core curriculum classes should always be taught only in English.

That is our American way. The immigrants of old conformed. The new ones can, too.

In 1997, Mitler, Merrill, et al conducted a federally mandated study of sleep deprivation in long haul truck drivers (New England Journal of Medicine, 1997, 337:

755-761). They, of course, found that sleep deprivation in association with demanding work schedules is an important public safety concern. And, they concluded that: "Sleep- deprivation to a degree that is known to impair performance did occur, suggesting that sleep deprivation could be a contributory factor in accidents involving long-haul truck drivers."

Nothing striking about that at all. Tired people often make a lot more mistakes than rested people. And, those commercially driving large trucks, buses, trains, and aircraft should be well rested. A glaring little secret is, they often are not. In fact, sometimes they are actually sleeping while working.

For instance, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) nearly 75% of all aircraft accidents are do to pilot error. That is probably stretching it some, but let's go with that, anyway.

When a commercial airline pilot flies less than 8 hours in a 24 hour period, FAA mandates that they must get at least 8 hours "rest." If a commercial airline pilot flies 9 or more hours in a 24 hour period, FAA requires they get 11 hours "rest" each 24 hour period. That sounds good on paper, but there are a few problems with it in practice.

Many of today's commercial airline pilots are scheduled in such a way that they may get very little "rest" at times. That is, they can be called at home after something less that a full night's sleep and told to report within 90 minutes. Therein, they fly an hour or two to wherever, let passengers out and pick up new ones and immediately take off for another destination. From that other destination, they would make yet another quick turn- around and go to a third destination, where they could have some down time. So, total "flying" time may be just under 8 hours, but they have actually been working anywhere from 10 to 12 hours.

But, according to FAA rules, they only need 8 hours of "rest." And, now is when things start to get interesting.

"Rest," in pilot lingo, means any time out of the aircraft. That is, the schedule could put them back at the aircraft again in 8 hours. So, it would take our pilot approximately 30 minutes to get to the hotel, some time to eat and whatnot, then sleep fast for five or six hours, and report to reverse the whole schedule.

Schedules similar to this are very common for many commercial pilots. Sometimes, actually, they get worse. And, remember, the 20 minutes or so it takes to "check out" the aircraft and go through the pre-flight check list is technically part of the "rest" the pilot gets from flying.

Sleeping while working, therefore, is not all that uncommon. One of the war stories related while interviewing pilots was from a young man who admitted he dozed off for about 30 minutes while in the air. His big surprise was that the fellow sitting next to him was also sleeping. The aircraft was doing its thing on autopilot. Another captain told of the second officer preparing to land after a long day. Autopilot was off at the time and the captain was going over his checklist. The captain looked up to see they were significantly off course for their approach to the runway and yelled to the copilot to correct. "Oh (expletive deleted)!" the copilot said. "I must have been sleeping."

It's not unheard of for pilots to be so tired they do not properly go through their landing check lists.

One pilot actually forgot to put the wheels down on a sizable commercial passenger aircraft. Some of the information can be found at <http://www.ntsb.gov/Publictn/Pub_list.htm>. Other problems are noted at <http://olias.arc.nasa.gov/ASRS/callback.html>.

The problem seems to be two fold: First, the schedules of many pilots are so tight they do not always get the rest they need and deserve to function optimally. Second, a number of pilots do not get proper nutrition while flying. Nor do they always get the time to actually sit down and eat something, like normal people.

Which brings us to an important point that needs to be studied (hint) by a good medical research group -- easy research. What is the safety implication when you mix both sleep deprivation and hypoglycemia in a working commercial airline pilot?

Long-haul truck drivers must adhere to a strict rest schedule and are hassled by authorities from coast to coast to insure that they do. So, why are things different for commercial airline pilots?

Perhaps those frequent flyers on Capitol Hill might be interested in investigating this sleep deprivation problem in professional airline pilots. FAA doesn't seem to care.

Due to (government says) rising drug prices, reduced competition in the health care field because of consolidations, and insurers playing catch-up after initially setting low rates to gain market share, analysts expect workers' health-care premiums to rise by 7 to 11 percent for large companies this year and in 2000. Worse yet, premiums for midsize firms may rise as much as 20 percent this year.

It also seems that, as costs rise, so does consumers' dissatisfaction with the medical care delivery system, especially with those operating the insurance companies. For instance, at least 29 percent were said to be discouraged by the complex referral rules in point-of- service plans. And it's true, freedom of choice in medical care is quickly diminishing. Insurance company clerks are directing the treatment plan, or so it seems to many.

Further compounding the cost problems is the fact that, for more than 30 years, states have been passing legislation that forces insurers to cover health care providers such as chiropractors and podiatrists, and services such as drug and alcohol abuse. Back in 1968 there were only five such mandates, by the end of last year there were 1,260 to worry about.

Most "experts" in the health care industry readily admit that the primary reason health care costs are rising is government interference. And it stands to reason that the greater the number of services mandated, the greater the costs.

Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) recently introduced "The Patients' Health Care Choice Act of 1999" (H.R. 1687), that includes a number of proposals designed to improve access to health insurance. The bill addresses the inequities created by the different tax treatment afforded employer-paid health benefits -- which are fully tax deductible for both employer and employee -- and health insurance purchased by the unemployed or individuals who work for small businesses, who must pay with after tax dollars. The bill tries to correct problems caused by government mandates by giving everyone a tax break for health care expenditures.

But there's a better way. Everyone in government knows it. But many politicians are afraid to implement it because they will then lose some control over the lives of the American people.

Last May, 43 Senate Republicans wrote Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) recommending corrections in Medical Savings Account legislation. This program was started for a measly four years and limited to just a few thousand people. The four-year MSA pilot program is now in its third year and many people who were previously uninsured are signing up. Hundreds of thousands more would, too, if the federal government would just get out of the way.

Presently, MSAs are only available to the self- employed and employees of firms with 50 or fewer workers. The Senators want to "allow" anyone to open an MSA, and permit both employees and employers -- rather than either one or the other as the law now stands -- to contribute to the accounts. They also want to make the MSA program permanent, which would encourage more insurers to enter the market. Another encouraging point is that the General Accounting Office estimated that some 37 percent of MSA participants were previously uninsured.

The socialists in government hate the Medical Savings Account plan because it is very simple, effectively gives control back to the patient and those not requiring much medical treatment might actually profit from it. Here's why:

Let's say that you have $4,000 per year for medical insurance. Under the MSA plan, this then becomes tax free money, exempt from income tax. A requirement of the plan is that you use half (or thereabouts) of that money to purchase a (catastrophic) health insurance plan with a $2,000 (or thereabouts) deductible. The other $2,000, then, goes into your personal medical savings account for whatever medical treatment you may need that year.

A patient may save that money in an interest bearing account forever, tax free. Or, they may use part of what they have accumulated for anything they wish. But, if not used for medical treatment, it will be taxed at that person's normal income tax rate.

Better yet, the patient picks the doctor, clinic or hospital they wish to hire for treatment. And, the patient can make any deal they wish for treatment. So, if Doctor XY down the road is giving good treatment at half the cost of Doctor ZA on the other side of town, go to whomsoever you wish -- and save the money. It's your money, after all.

Medical Savings Accounts, or MSAs; they may not be for everyone, but it sure sounds like a good deal on this end.

(This is Jeff in central Michigan) 

  ** uhuh **

The President said he is reducing taxes.

uhuh.

Congress says they are balancing the budget.

uhuh. Sez who?

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