I~ NATION/WORLD The Mic1higan Daily Monday, September 28, 1998-- 9A Georges takes aim at Louisiana The Washington Post NEW ORLEANS - The leading ge of Hurricane Georges lashed the northern Gulf Coast along Alabama and Mississippi with high winds and dri- ving rain yesterday and then took aim here, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee inland. In all, more than 1.5 million people were ordered to leave New Orleans and low-lying coastal areas nearby, and more than 15,000 descended on the city's nine emergency shelters, includ- g the cavernous Louisiana 'perdome and the sprawling riverside Ernest Morial Convention Center. The center of the storm, which already killed more than 300 people during a week-long rampage through the Caribbean and Florida Keys, was crawling along the Gulf Coast at 8 mph, and forecasters said it probably will slow even more. The fear was that Georges would hang over the Mississippi Delta, suspended by a cool tront that is headed south toward the region. If that happens, forecasters said, as much as 30 inches of rain could fall over two days. As the storm, packing winds of up to 110 mph, churned in the Gulf of Mexico toward the mouth of the Mississippi River, its outer fringes began to whip. the coast with 50 mph winds and offshore waves up to 33 feet. A hurricane warning was in effect from Onama City, Fla., to Morgan City, La., and forecasters predicted Georges could spawn tornadoes as it made land- fall and moved northwest. "This is an absolutely worst-case sce- nario," said James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after conferring by telephone with President Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and the governors of the affect- ed states. "We've got the potential for a major disaster down there." Witt said Georges posed the worst threat to this city since Hurricane Betsy roared across the Gulf Coast in 1965, killing 61 people in Louisiana and caus- ing millions of dollars in damage as it flooded downtown New Orleans and other low-lying areas. Another big storm, Camille, slammed into the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana in 1969, causing widespread flooding before continuing as far north as Virginia and leaving 259 dead. While no amount of preparation could handle what Georges was expect- ed to throw at the northern Gulf Coast over the next two days, Witt said, even before the storm system passed by the Virgin Islands last week, FEMA began deploying emergency workers, flying in search-and-rescue and medical teams and positioning emergency equipment such as generators, water pumps, sand- bags, tents, cots and plastic sheeting used to cover houses whose roofs have been ripped off. Witt said his most serious concern is that a storm surge as high as 15 to 20 feet could drive Lake Pontchartrain over its levees and submerge New Orleans just as storm-whipped water is driven up the Mississippi River toward the city. For a city that sits below sea level and is surrounded by tidal lakes, swamps and the Mississippi River, the results could be catastrophic, he said. "We're the best city in America, but this may not have been the best place 300 years ago to place a city," said Mayor Marc Morial. Witt said the Army Corps of Engineers had been checking the levees on Pontchartrain and had positioned New Orleans resident Joey Sansovich pushes his bicycle through floodwaters on a walkway along Lake Ponchartrain yesterday. Sansovich decided to stay in New Orleans through Hurricane Georges. barges with massive water pumps, while FEMA put in place a million bags that could be filled for emergency shoring. Many New Orleans residents who had planned to weather the storm at home changed their minds yesterday and dashed to the highways as Saturday's balmy weather gave way to darker skies and gusty winds. Residents raced to get out of the area by noon when officials said high winds would force state troopers to close all highways. "I got scared at the last minute," said Dorothy Carradine, as she packed lug- gage and pictures and her 10-member family into a two-car caravan. "I'm not sure where we're going," she said, "but it looks bad enough to get out of here." Morial called for a mandatory 6 p.m. curfew in the city and issued an urgent appeal for volunteer doctors and nurses to report to the Superdome. New Orleans International Airport, which was closed to air traffic, was transformed into an emergency shelter after the city's main evacuation route, Interstate 10, was closed at noon. "I said to myself, 'Oh, Lord, please let there be some place to go.' " said Schena Lewis, as she herded her family into a crowded meeting room at the 69,000-seat Superdome. Although she described the accommodations as uncomfortable and the crowd of 10,000 chaotic, Lewis said she'd be glad to call the stadium home until Georges' fury had passed. In the nearly deserted French Quarter, tourists wandered in search of food and supplies. "It feels like we're the only ones left,' said Sue Turner, who was in town from Philadelphia fbr a pharmaceuticals convention. "We couldn't get a flight out or a rental car. We're going to ride it out at our hotel because we have no choice." With a video camera he bought to film Bourbon Streets carnival atmos- phere, Dave Turner, caught instead eerie desolation. In a residential area of downtown New Orleans, Shona Foster, waited 45 minutes to get into a corner grocery store. She left with crackers, bread and water. Along Interstate 10, which stretches east-west across the gulf states, traffic was sparse and visibility clouded as motorists drove with their headlights on throughout the day. Nixon impeachment offers Clinton lessons Slovakian elections may brmg changes The Washington Post BRATISLAVA, Slovakia - For Zuzana Slavkovska an economics student at the university in Bratislava, it seemed yesterday morning that a fog was lifting. "We were so isolated," she said, as she walked the winding, narrow streets of this city's old town where sidewalk cafes and high-fashion boutiques abut Gothic archways. "Now, maybe we can take our place in Europe." Just an hour east of Vienna and within sight of the Austrian border, this small central European capital had fallen into a self-created cocoon, failing to make the progress toward European integration that some of its neighbors had made in the last four years. The United States and the European Union had repeatedly crit- icized the current government, led by Vladimir Meciar, saying it had trampled democracy. And Slovakia's applications for membership in NATO and the EU were shelved. But following national elections over the weekend there is a sense, especially among the young of this striving city, that Slovakia is on the verge of a new era with a new gov- ernment. "People were not living in a good mood," said Ivan Telepcak who is doing compulsory military service. "It's very important that a good change comes out of the election. I think we're very optimistic now." Slovakia is likely to have a new coalition government in the next month after the announcement yes- terday morning of official prelimi- nary election results, which showed that a likely coalition of four oppo- sition parties would command 93 seats in the 150-seat parliament. At a news conference yesterday, Mikulas Dzurinda,ethe leader of the largest of the opposition parties, the Slovak Democratic Coalition, said negotiations to form a new govern- ment have already begun. He spoke like a prime minister-in- waiting; saying his priorities were jobs, reducing crime and getting the country's application for EU mem- bership on track. The current government, led by Meciar and his party, the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, refused to concede defeat. Meciar's party remained the largest in parliament with 43 seats, and officials said they would at least try to form a coalition government. But their pronouncements lacked confidence. "We accept the results of the elec- tion," said Augustin Huska, deputy chair of the parliament and a mem- ber of the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. "Our party won, but it has certain signs of a Pyrrhic victory." But yesterday Jozef Migas, the leader of the Party of the Democratic Left, the third-largest party, said "the creation of a govern- ment with (the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia) is unaccept- able for us," effectively ensuring the formation of a new government coalition. Meciar, who had said he would leave politics before he would go into opposition, made no appear- ances yesterday. The populist figure has dominated Slovak politics since the country of 5.5 million people became an independent state in 1993 after the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia. While Meciar's political future is unclear, he bestowed a looming financial crisis on the incoming government. According to one Western diplo- mat, there is virtually no money in government coffers for the remain- ing months of the current budget year. The Slovak currency, then-koruna, is dropping to the bottom of its fluc- tuation band, amid fears it may have to be devalued. Government credit has been downgraded to junk-bond status by Standard & Poor's. Slovakia now has one of the high- est interest rates in Europe and the country's robust economic growth is beginning to look very fragile in the face of severe budget and trade deficits. That has led to some speculation The Washington Post WASHINGTON -With the House scheduled to vote Oct. 9 on whether to start formal impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, the pattern it set in 1974 with the inves- tigation of Richard Nixon offers both hope and despair for the person in the White House. If the House does now what it did nearly 25 years ago, it will authorize an open-ended investigation of the president, without any restrictions or deadlines. The actual measure voted by the House would be called a "resolu- tion of inquiry," and if the Watergate example holds, it would not be lim- ited to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, cam- paign financing abuses, technology transfers to China or any other partic- ular allegations against the Clinton White House.5 A Nixon-style resolu- 4 tion of inquiry would also permit the House to cen- sure Clinton or take some Gingrich other action short of vot- ing on articles of impeachment that would send him to trial in the Senate. The resolution directed at Nixon, adopted Feb. 6, 1974, by a vote of 410 to 4, didn't even mention Watergate. It simply said that the House Judiciary Committee "is authorized and directed to investigate fully and completely whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its constitutional power to impeach Richard Nixon, president of the United States of America." Democrats fearful of "a fishing expedition" against Clinton can take no comfort in such a wide-open authorization, but they might find solace in the next part of the 1974 resolution. It said that "the committee shall report to the House of Representatives such resolutions, arti- cles of impeachment, or other recommenda- tions as it deems proper." Although House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R- Ga.) has rejected a quick plea-bargain type of deal to head off impeachment proceedings, Clinton supporters might use such a provision to press for a censure, large fine or some other punishment short of impeachment at the end of the inquiry. The special counsel for the Nixon inquiry, John Doar, confirmed at a Jan. 31, 1974, Judiciary Committee business meeting that the provision was intended to give the panel "broad leeway as to what it might recommend, based upon the facts as they were developed in the course of the inquiry." When then-Rep. Charles Wiggins (R-Calif.) a Nixon defender, sought assurances that the com- mittee would not go beyond its essential task of deciding whether the president should be impeached, Doar balked. Whatever the committee recommended, he told Wiggins, "would depend upon how the inquiry developed and what facts and circumstances were brought forward." The chair of the Judiciary Committee now, Rep. Henry Hyde, (R-Ill.) told reporters last week that he had little interest in "casting a very wide net" to expand the panel's impeachment deliberations beyond the Lewinsky case. Neither, as it turned out, did the Nixon-era panel expand its investigation. Despite the no- holds-barred wording of the resolution, it did lit- tle original investigating and, under Doar's tute- lage, confined itself largely to information that had already been uncovered by Watergate prose- cutors and the Senate Watergate committee. In the controversy over Clinton, outnumbered House Democrats are making many of the same complaints that then-outnumbered Republicans raised on Nixon's behalf. The Democrats want a deadline for the inquiry; they opposed it in 1974. They want a right to issue their own subpoenas; they insisted on a veto when the Republican minority asked for that right in 1974. If a formal inquiry is conducted this fall, the House could still postpone a decision on whether to vote on articles of impeachment until the new Congress convenes in January. As a House Judiciary Committee manual on impeachment puts it, "the House sometimes continues an investigation begun in a preceding Congress with view to an impeachment, mak- ing use of the former report and testimony already taken." I AP PHOTO *President Clinton prepares to board Airforce One at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday. The president Is on the final day of a three-day, three-state fundraising trip. t Critics decry 'sexual McCarthyism' in media 0 Standards of personal o onduct shift debates over proper leadership The Los Angeles Times NEW YORK - As the mass media continue their saturation coverage of the Clinton scandal, some critics have coined the phrase "sexual his wife or had a homosexual encounter. He dared his opponent to do the same. In Texas, Gov. George Bush - widely expected to be a Republican presidential candidate - has been openly discussing his rowdy past with magazine writers, in the apparent hope of immunizing himself against future news investigations. heavy fire. The main similarity between cur- rent events and the Red scare of the 1950s is the issue of privacy, accord- ing to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia. "When you open up everything in someone's past to scrutiny, and with no sense of fairness, it can lead to a government, and thousands of people lost their jobs after they were "black- listed" for allegedly subversive activi- ties. McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954 for his behavior, and died three years later. Today, "sexual McCarthyism" means different things, depending on whom you talk to. For some, it high- lights Starr's probing of President public figures have become legitimate targets of inquiry for media and gov- ernment investigators - even though polls suggest a majority of Americans do not approve. America has a long tradition of civil liberties, but witch hunts of any kind put it to the test, said Ellen Shrecker, author of "Many Are the Crimes," a history of McCarthyism. In the 1950s 'r