Tilting at Windmills.

Viagra and the Performing Arts * The Rebate That Isn't * Virtuous Salads and Naughty Desserts Tom Daschle's Hillary Problem * E-mail and the Overflowing Inbox

THERE IS MUCH THAT IS marvelous about Barbara Ehrenreich's recent book, Nickel and Dimed. Most impressive of all is her firsthand reporting of what it's like to work in a low-wage job. This is the kind of journalism this magazine has long encouraged. It takes enterprise, imagination, and guts--all of which Ehrenreich possesses in generous amounts.

My one quarrel with the book is that she dismisses housework as inherently demeaning. Of course, it can be demeaning. But it is less and less so these days. The reason is that increasingly the employing couples are at work and away from the house. When my housewife mother used to oversee our maid with new instructions every fifteen minutes or so, I used to feel sorry for the poor soul. Mother was a nice woman, but that much supervision can be maddening.

Most of today's domestic employers, though, are not at home. They are at the office. Even when they are at home, they're likely to be busy working in their home office. So the housekeeper is free to proceed at his or her own pace, thinking about whatever comes to mind. And this to me is the magic secret: being free to set your own pace, your mind free to roam where it will.

In my adolescence, I held a number of bottom-of-the-chain jobs, chief of which was as a private in the United States Army. Of all those jobs, the one I enjoyed most was messenger. As a messenger, I was free to think about politics, sports, and gifts--the three subjects that, in reverse order, engaged my imagination the most. Unsupervised housework offers similar freedom. And since housekeepers are in short supply, they don't have to work for people who leave too onerous a list of written instructions or, as in Ehrenreich's case, a cruddy toilet bowl.

In the Washington area, housekeepers can earn $20 an hour. If they work through a company, however, they get less and can be required to work tight Schedules that are as bad as being supervised by my mother. The companies are popular because household couples don't want to do Social Security paperwork and run the risk of employing illegal immigrants. If the laws were changed so that the employer of a household worker who worked fewer than, say, 10 hours a week for that employer was not responsible for Social Security paperwork and had no responsibility for determining the immigration status of the employees, many of these companies would go out of businesses, and the housekeepers could have the best-paying jobs to choose among. And they, too, would have the glorious opportunity to daydream.

DID YOU THINK THAT WHAT Bush calls a rebate is really a rebate? Most people I know think that they were getting a rebate on the 2000 taxes they paid in April. What they're actually getting is an advance on the money they will save next year because of the tax cut. If you got a $300 "rebate" this year, the tax cut will save you $300 less next year.

IF YOU'RE NOT WORRIED ABOUT Bush's plans to expand Alaskan oil drilling, you might consider that there are now only five inspectors to police all the pipelines in the state. Even Indiana, which produces only 2.5 million barrels of oil annually compared to Alaska's 400 million, has nine inspectors. What's more, Alaska's inspectors don't make surprise visits. They tell the companies when they're coming so they have time to clean up their act.

"I'VE SPENT HALF THE DAY catching up on my e-mail," a friend told me last week. How long had he been away? One week. E-mail, as we pointed out not long ago, has become a major time-consumer. It reminds me of a phenomenon I encountered when I was a government bureaucrat: the tyranny of the in-box. When you arrived in the office each morning, you usually found your in-box overflowing with memoranda. The reason was that everyone sent copies of their memos to practically everyone of any importance either to impress them or for fear of offending them.

And you, the recipient, wanted to be on the receiving end. After all, if you're not getting the memos, it probably means your power and influence are thought to be diminishing.

In any event, the solution to this problem, which I urge on the victims of e-mail today: First do what you have to get done that day, then go to e-mail. Going through it at the end of the day when you're eager to get home is more likely to make you quicker to discard the marginal and the junk than to sit back and carefully peruse everything as if you had all day.

BUT I MUST SAY I DO ENJOY some of those e-mail jokes. Did you read the one about the differences between men and women?

Two examples:

"When a woman says she'll be ready to go out in five minutes, she's using the same meaning of time as when a man says that the football game has five minutes left."

And "never in the history of the world has a man excused himself from a restaurant table by saying `Hey Tom, I'm going to the men's room. Want to join me?"'

I RECENTLY DISCOVERED ANOTHER difference between the sexes. My wife and I went to a luncheon sponsored by a women's organization where women made up 90 percent of the audience. The main course was a salad. But then came a giant slice of chocolate ice-cream cake. I turned to my wife and remarked that the two courses seemed somewhat inconsistent. Her answer was that a similar menu was served at almost every women's lunch, whether it was an organized group or just a few girls getting together. First a virtuous salad, followed by a naughty goodie. I'm sure this is an important clue to the feminine psyche, one that I suspect, had I understood it, could have proved invaluable to me during the dating days of my youth.

SPEAKING OF MY WIFE, SHE volunteers a half-day each week at a poverty program called Bread For the City. Part of her job is to interview poor people about their situations. She reports that one of their main problems is the shortage of apartments they can afford. HUD has a rent-subsidy program but nationally it provides only 29 million subsidized apartments for 5.1 million low-income families that qualify for help. Here in D.C., 15,000 families are on the waiting list. In California, according to Jennifer Oldham of the Los Angeles Times, "One low-income unit exists for every four households that need one."

And the problem is getting worse, not better. Landlords are opting out of the subsidy program so that they can rent to higher-income tenants. What this means here in D.C. is that 2,000 families that have federal housing vouchers can't use them because of the lack of space. If you doubt the reality of this problem, please read Ehrenreich's account of the desperate search for housing while she was working a low-wage job in Minnesota.

IN JULY, THE D.C. CITY COUNCIL held a hearing on a bill to restrict cell-phone use by drivers. Guess who was there to oppose it? The phone manufacturers--Nextel, Cingular Wireless, AT&T Wireless, VoiceStream Wireless, and Sprint PCS. The companies, it appears, prefer making money to saving lives.

SOME GOOD NEWS ON THE CELL phone front: After King Abdullah of Jordan complained about a cell phone ringing during prayer service in his mosque, Image Sensing Systems developed a cell-phone jamming device. Thus far, it has shipped 5,000 of the inventions around the world, demonstrating that profit can be made by doing good. The problem in the United States is that the FCC has made cell-phone jamming punishable with an $11,000-per-day fine. So if you want movies, concerts, and religious services uninterrupted by ringing phones, you're going to have to write the FCC--and it's a good idea to send a copy to your congressman.

You PROBABLY SAW ON TELEVISION the horrible damage done by the July floods in West Virginia. But did you know the flooding was made worse by mountain-top removal, a practice that in itself is hideous? Mountain-top removal decreases the number and length of streams by filling in valleys and concentrating the runoff, which in turn increases the chance for flooding. A federal study reported by Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette found that just "one huge valley-fill would increase runoff by 42 percent."

WHY DO PEOPLE CHOOSE TO build houses where disaster is likely to strike? Each year thousands of homes are built where forest fires, floods, and hurricanes are predictable hazards. They expect the government to bail them out when trouble strikes. It breaks my heart when I see some young forest-fire fighter say, "We're determined to save these homes," when he's risking his life to save some rich couple's vacation palace that should never have been built where it was. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming the threatened homes the young men are worrying about average $5 million in value.

BILL CLINTON, The Washington Post's John Harris reports, will soon become active on such public issues as fighting AIDS in the Third World and racism at home. It's about time. For the last six months, he's struck me as an American Duke of Windsor, appearing at tennis and golf matches and other celebrity events and doing little else besides making speeches, for which he's getting $125,000 at home and $250,000 abroad, which may explain why so many of the matches seem to be in Europe. He may have been--indeed, I think he was--a better president than Jimmy Carter, but he has a long, long way to go before he'll be considered a better former president than Carter.

(Three of the four friends I asked to read this item thought it was too hard on Clinton. It is certainly true that there is something about Bill Clinton that brings out the caustic in his critics. Indeed, I have often lamented this tendency toward overkill in my fellow journalists' comments about him. Perhaps my phrasing was similarly too severe, but my advice is really offered in the same friendly spirit as my 1993 warning to him to watch his tendency toward imprudent sexual adventure. My current concern is that, like the duke, he has a predilection for hanging out with celebrities and for wallowing in self-pity. He is also one of the great natural leaders of my lifetime, a man capable of doing enormous good. And it is this side of him that I pray will dominate his ex-presidency.)

IF I HAD TO CHOOSE NOW, TOM Daschle would be my candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. Some of my friends think that he lacks star-power, but almost every time I see him on television I find him engagingly straightforward, without a trace of the stuffy pretentiousness characteristic of politicians whose regard for themselves is excessive. His command of the issues is impressive. And other senators tell me that he is consistently fair and reasonable in his dealings with them.

Of course, his downside as a candidate is that, as a senator, he has had to take stands on a great many controversial issues, building a record certain to displease significant interest groups. This explains why we have not elected a sitting senator to be president for more than 40 years. Given that the last one was John Kennedy, maybe we should try again.

THE MOUNTING EVIDENCE OF THE Bush administration's anti-regulatory--meaning anti-health and safety and promonopoly--bias is now reaching an appalling stage. Sheila Gall is proposed as chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, even though her record on a child safety device is embarrassingly pro industry. John Ashcroft let the tobacco industry know that he favors settlement of the federal government's suit, thus undercutting the government's negotiating position. The FCC repays Rupert Murdoch's devotion to conservatism and the GOP by letting him control two New York TV stations as well as The New York Post, violating the old FCC policy that a newspaper owner could not own a television station in the same city.

John Graham, Bush's choice to head OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which makes him a regulatory czar who can block any rule, has argued that smog protects people from too much sunlight, that pesticides are a "trivial" concern, and that cell phones should not be regulated.

Harvey Pitt, Bush's choice to head the Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), earned $3,055,578 representing such clients as Datek Online, Merrill Lynch, Dean Wittier, Prince William, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Big Five accounting firms, as well as the trade associations, the securities fund industries, and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants--all of which are supposed to be regulated by the SEC.

EVERY DAY SEEMS TO BRING A headline like "Early Win Emboldens Lobbyists for Business," "FCC OKs Radio Mergers," "Labor Choice Decried Ergonomics Rule," "Dioxin Report by EPA on Hold," "Bush Plans to Shift Some EPA Enforcement to the State, "With Nominees, Bush Lays Wide Path to Deregulation." All this comes at a time when, as we keep pointing out, the need is for more and tougher regulation evidenced by such headlines as "Complaints on Movers are Rising," "Congress Scuttles Watchdog Agency," "U.S. Report Faults Agency That Oversees Investor Claims," "Critics say U.S. Energy Agency is Weak on Oversight of Utilities" and, after the recent CSX tunnel accident, "Baltimore Deraihnent Part of National Trend."

BACK TO TOM DASCHLE FOR A moment. One drawback to his candidacy is that he has a Hillary Clinton problem. His wife, Linda Hall Daschle, works for the Washington law firm of Baker, Donelson, Bearing, and Caldwell. This is a situation similar to that of Mrs. Clinton while she practiced with the Rose law firm during her husband's governorship. She says, according to Leslie Wayne of The New York Times, "that she has made it clear that she doesn't lobby her husband or his Senate colleagues." But it's hard to imagine that the other members of the firm hesitate to let a prospective client know that the Senate majority leader's spouse is among their colleagues, meaning that Mrs. Daschle's presence in the firm is used to attract business just as Mrs. Clinton's was. That seems so inevitable that we can hardly blame Mrs. Daschle, but we can and should blame Tom Daschle if he ever permits one of her clients to unduly influence his official actions.

JOHN POLLARD, WHO WAS A GOVernor of Virginia from 1930 to 1934, is the author of Commentary: Definitions Not Found in Dictionaries. One definition that, as a former bureaucrat, I especially like: "Committee: A group of men who keep minutes and waste hours."

BACK TO RENTERS for a moment. Did you know that Congress has enacted tax policies that have the effect of screwing the renter and subsidizing the individual home owner? This means that the areas hurt the most are the central cities. According to The Washington Post, the net transfer of wealth from central cities to suburbs, as a result of tax policies, is $18 billion.

ONE MORE REASON HEALTH--CARE costs are rising: According to a recent survey of medical residents, reported in The Wall Street Journal, 90 percent of beginning primary-care physicians expect to earn between $101,000 and $150,000 in their first year. Of the specialists, 82 percent expect first-year income to exceed $150,000.

SPEAKING OF HEALTH-CARE COSTS, you probably know that generic drugs are cheaper than the brand-names. Then why aren't there more of them? One reason is that the big drug companies use lawsuits to delay or prevent generic drug production. Another is because the generic producers often can't afford protracted litigation. How Schering-Plough used these legal techniques to protect Claritin from competition and how other drug manufacturers have behaved similarly are documented in a July Wall Street Journal article by Gardiner Harris and Chris Adams. Another way generic production is discouraged, according to ABC News, is by the big company paying the small generic company not to produce or to produce in limited quantity. This sounds like bribery. Where is the Department of Justice?

TOO OFTEN, THE MEDIA WILL focus on one element of a larger story and beat the drums for it while practically ignoring the rest that is often equally or more important. All the attention paid to the Patients' Bill of Rights makes people think it is the main health story, but more important is the story of the 44 million people who are uninsured; the many others who are inadequately insured; and the grossly inadequate system to protect patients from unjust physicians, greedy drug companies, and hospitals where the patient often seems to be the low man on the totem pole.

SIMILARLY, THE FOCUS ON TESTing encouraged by Bush's education bill should not divert attention from the need for better teachers, better administrators, and better school buildings, not to mention teachers' unions that care more about education than job security and seniority rights for mediocre teachers. The power of second-rate schools of education overcredentialing must be broken so that teachers are hired on the basis of subject knowledge and teaching ability demonstrated in videotaped classroom performances. I was delighted to see that Jay Mathews, The Washington Post's thoughtful education reporter, recently endorsed credentialing based on taped classroom performance, which is now done in Kentucky. Mathews also notes that requiring education courses discourages mid-career switches to teaching by people who have vast experience and impressive subject knowledge. A Nobel laureate in physics who hasn't taken education courses couldn't get hired in most public-school systems today. This is because the education schools, as well as teachers' unions, have too much power over state legislatures. Unless the rest of us organize to fight, they will continue to strangle crucial reform in the credentialing process. Each of those matters seem to me to be at least as important as testing.

I'M SURE YOU KNOW ABOUT Viagra and all of the blessings it has conferred on the American male. But one you might not be aware of was recently reported by the Los Angeles Times. It seems that in the pornographic film industry, male actors sometimes had trouble rising to the occasion when the director said "Lights! Camera! Action!" Viagra has eliminated the problem.

CONSERVATIVES WHO ARGUE against government programs to help the needy will say that it's up to each individual to help. If we all do our part, there will be no need for government programs. There are several problems with this attitude, one of which is that not everyone, including a lot of conservatives, does his part. But that can't be said of Bill Frist, a Republican senator from Tennessee. A recent column by Al Hunt in The Wall Street Journal describes how Frist, who was a physician before he got elected to the Senate, has three times gone to Sudan to contribute his professional skills to helping heal the victims of that country's civil war. He also treats patients at free clinics here in Washington once a month. Although I disagree with Frist on a lot of issues, my admiration for these actions is immense.