WASHINGTON -- With Republicans bruised by two government shutdowns, the House overwhelmingly approved legislation yesterday to keep federal agencies running through March 15. The White House said President Clinton would sign it as the yearlong budget fires cooled on all fronts.
After settling an impasse with the White House over abortion restrictions and spending levels, the House voted 371-42 for a stopgap measure that would temporarily finance dozens of federal agencies, though at lower levels than 1995. The Senate was expected to approve the legislation today.
After taking a drubbing in public opinion polls for their combative tactics, Republicans were no longer vowing to halt government's most basic functions unless their demands for a balanced budget in seven years were met. With this fall's elections on their minds, both sides seemed to feel the best path, for now, was to settle immediate differences and save their most stubborn disputes over Medicare, Medicaid and welfare until next year.
WASHINGTON -- Aware of Bill Clinton's friendship with the owner of a failing Arkansas savings and loan, a state regulator warned one of Clinton's aides the federal government was about to crack down, the regulator testified yesterday.
Confronted with a handwritten note she sent to the governor's office, Beverly Bassett Schaffer said she knew S&L owner James McDougal had been a friend of the governor and ''I believe ... abused his relationship with Bill Clinton.''
Schaffer, the former Arkansas securities commissioner, told the Senate Whitewater Committee that she was concerned McDougal might try to approach the governor's office for help. She said she sent the July 2, 1986, note to aide Sam Bratton so that the governor's office would have nothing further to do with McDougal.
NEW YORK -- Kelsey Grammer, TV's Dr. Frazier Crane, finds himself a rather troubled patient.
''I've always been my own worst enemy,'' the actor said in Sunday's Parade magazine. ''I can undermine myself better than anyone else, and I'm the one I have to prove the most to.''
Not even his Emmy-winning performance as the stuffy psychiatrist on ''Cheers'' and its spinoff ''Frazier'' ''weren't enough to convince me I had achieved anything,'' he said.
Grammer's life is rife with tragedy: the murder of his father, the rape and murder of his sister, two divorces and a serious drug problem.
But Grammer, 40, said he has channeled his adversity into comedy.
''I believe that really good actors have to participate in a great deal of pain,'' he said. ''That's what shakes your brain up, so you become a sponge for your emotions.''
Compiled from wire reports.