Political Memo: Resurrecting Ghosts of Pardons Past His testimony revealed little about how Mr. Rich won his pardon, and Republicans had worked behind the scenes to spare him from appearing at all. But by calling him, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the committee's ranking Democrat, sought to make a point: Mr. Clinton may have been irresponsible in issuing his final sheaf of pardons, but Republicans do not have completely clean hands on the issue. During the hearing, Mr. Waxman cited the case of Orlando Borsch, suspected of being a terrorist from Cuba, who was released from jail in 1990 by the administration of former President George Bush. Jeb Bush, the former president's son who is now the governor of Florida, had lobbied for Mr. Borsch's release, which had become a cause c�l�bre among Cuban-Americans in South Florida. The Borsch case was not the only one that Mr. Waxman raised as he sought to turn the tables on Republican investigators in what has become the Democrats' tried-and-true technique for trying to trip up the many inquiries started by Mr. Burton, Republican of Indiana. Mr. Waxman said he found the pardon of Armand Hammer just as suspicious as that of Mr. Rich. In 1989, former President Bush pardoned Mr. Hammer, the former head of Occidental Petroleum who had pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. Mr. Hammer was a major donor to Republicans. Shortly before he received the pardon, he gave more than $100,000 to the Republican Party and $100,000 to the Bush-Quayle Inaugural Committee. "The appearance of a quid pro quo is just as strong in the Hammer case as in the Rich case, if not stronger, since Mr. Hammer himself gave the contribution," Mr. Waxman said. In the case of Mr. Rich, it was his former wife, Denise, who was both a pardon advocate and major donor � she gave $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library. Mr. Waxman called on Mr. Burton to subpoena the library records of the Republican administrations to look into potential abuses. Mr. Burton did not take him up on his offer. "I was turned down," Mr. Waxman said. "It seems we can pursue President Clinton's library, but not President Bush's or President Reagan's." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/politics/04MEMO.html?pagewanted=allt

Doing the Math on Bush's Tax Cut In all of Washington, there are three computer models built to produce what are called distributional tables � showing how any particular tax increase or tax cut would be distributed among various income levels. One model is at the Treasury Department, one is at Congress's Joint Tax Committee and one is at Citizens for Tax Justice, a research institute sponsored by labor unions. The methods are slightly different. But in the end, the analyses differ only at the margins. In the past, Democrats ran either the Treasury Department or the Joint Tax Committee � depending on which party controlled the White House and which controlled Congress � and whenever a tax proposal was made, the computer the Democrats were in charge of would instantly produce a distributional table. But Republicans have never liked that kind of measurement, saying it contributed to class warfare. So this year, with Republicans in charge of the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in almost 50 years, neither the Treasury nor Congress has provided distributional tables on President Bush's tax plan. � Tax analysts from both parties who have worked at the Congressional Joint Tax Committee and the Office of Tax Analysis in the Treasury say the relevant information on how the Bush plan would affect people with different incomes is already in the computers. All it would take to produce the distributional tables would be for someone to push a button, the analysts said. But that may not happen. At a press briefing on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill said that figuring out what the tax benefits of the president plan would be at various income levels resulted only in "a nonsense set of statistics." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/politics/04CONG.html?pagewanted=all

Doing the Math on Bush's Tax Cut If the entire plan becomes law, the richest 1 percent of taxpayers would get between 22 percent and 45 percent of the tax benefits, depending on how the calculations are done. These are the 1.3 million taxpayers with annual incomes of more than about $370,000. Because some of them are fabulously wealthy, the average income of these taxpayers is more than $1 million. The poorest 60 percent of taxpayers, those with incomes below $44,000, would receive less than 13 percent of the money from lower taxes in the Bush proposals. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/04/politics/04CONG.html?pagewanted=all

Chicago Tribune | News - Columnists - Clarence Page Yet there he was portraying himself as the crusading victim as he gave his pep talk to the right-wing's troops. "Today, no one can honestly be surprised by the venomous attacks" unleashed on anyone who strays from the conventional wisdom, Thomas said. Right. Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House--helped along, as I recall, by a fortuitous Supreme Court decision in which Thomas helped end the recount of Florida's presidential votes. Thomas had Vice President Dick Cheney and several Cabinet members sitting in the audience while he spun his tale of woe and delivered his defiant closing to robust applause: "Be not afraid!" Afraid? Excuse me? Afraid of what? Too much power?� Echoes of his speech have come to mind as I have been reading a book that has critics of America's civil rights leadership all abuzz this season. It is called "Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America," by John H. McWhorter, a black associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. It's the best among the latest of what I call "black self-flagellation" books. Since at least 1990, when Shelby Steele's seminal "Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America" came out, it seems that no black writer has gone broke by portraying black people as our own worst enemy. Quite the opposite, one can win instant fame, high-priced speaking engagements, warm praise from conservative talk-show hosts and perhaps even a lucrative fellowship or two. (The same is true, by the way, of many so-called "post-feminist" books that describe feminism as a betrayal of women, but that's a topic for another day.) http://chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/page/0,1122,SAV-0103040059,00.html