aul Begala, the former Clinton advisor who now co-hosts the MSNBC show Equal Time, said on Friday that Rick Lazio "was a total butt boy for Gingrich the whole time he was in the Congress."

It's not often liberals resort (at least in public) to anti-homosexual epithets when describing politicians they don't like. So we decided to contact the Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, for a comment on Begala's remark. Said spokesman Wayne Besen: "He should have known better. Because of his stands in the past on our community, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. But it was crass. He turned it into a locker-room joke. Something like that shouldn't be on television."

Graham Segroves of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force was even more pacific. "I wouldn't rush to judgment," he said. "It could be a kissing reference."

We doubt that's what Don Imus intended in 1994, when, according to a Washington Post story, he referred to Begala as "an absolute Clinton butt boy and wussie."

Begala was out of the country on Monday and unable to return NR's phone calls.

Checks, Please
It's not measuring-the-drapes time yet, by any means, but George W. Bush is doing well enough in the polls that it's at least worth contemplating the possibility that within eight months, Republicans will hold both the White House and the Congress (if only by their fingernails). Republicans haven't enjoyed that kind of power since the 1920s.

It's pretty obvious what that means: huge staffing problems. Republicans have trouble putting competent, principled people in the jobs they control now. (The difficulty varies with the type of job; good press secretaries are particularly hard to come by.) They will have thousands more jobs to fill if they do well in November. The problem will be exacerbated by K Street: Business lobbies will suddenly need to hire more Republicans as well.

To fill jobs in Washington, conservatives would probably have to raid their state think tanks and the staffs of some of the more reform-minded governors and state legislators. A surprising number of such folks, however, do not realize that they will usually be expected to have made some minimal effort for the winning candidate before they can get a political appointment. If they want to write a check to the Bush campaign, they have only a few months left: Taxpayers basically start footing the bill after the convention. Would-be job applicants can also work the phone banks for Bush in the fall.

And each check yields a marginal increase in the probability that conservatives will be dealing with this problem next year, and not the unhappier one of having to find new jobs.

A New Calculator
The National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank based in Dallas, has a new website that lets you calculate how much you are likely to pay in Social Security taxes, what you're likely to receive from the program, and how much you could have made by investing that money for a reasonable return. NCPA president John Goodman says the calculator, at www.mysocialsecurity.org, is more accurate than any other one, because it uses Census data on nearly 500 occupations to project a user's future income growth.