o the Clintons have something against extra-terrestrials? On Saturday — yes, April Fools' Day — President Clinton provided this analysis of the GOP strategy in the New York Senate race: "The only way they can win is to convince people that we're space aliens."

We've scoured the Internet, and nowhere can we find a statement in which the Clintons actually deny that they're from another planet - not that we'd believe them if they did.

Alien lifeforms have been a recurring topic of conversation for the First Couple. Last summer, Hillary complained to a Paris audience about "space aliens that are always blowing up Washington, D.C., and the White House" in the movies - an apparent reference to "Independence Day."

Census Takers
Early signs suggest that millions of Americans aren't returning their census forms, which means the Census Bureau probably won't reverse the trend in declining participation rates despite spending a bundle of tax dollars on ads that say your house will burn down if you don't tell the government how many toilets are in it. Democrats are preparing to blame this Clinton administration failure on Republicans such as Trent Lott and Chuck Hagel, both of whom have said people should not answer questions they consider nosy. President Clinton took a swipe at them in his Saturday radio address: "Those who suggest that filling out your census form isn't essential are plainly wrong."

Refusing to complete census forms — especially the questions on race and ethnicity — is a worthwhile act of civil disobedience. But this groundswell of discontent points as well to the need for legislative action. The questions on both the long form and the short form have been public for some time; the GOP didn't think to complain about them until they were in the mail.

If Lott and Hagel want to show that they are not simply trying to score a few cheap points while passions are high, they can now offer legislation to correct this problem for next time. It's too late to do anything about the questions on the 2000 census, but it's not too early to start thinking about 2010.