Tennessee All Shook Up Over Al; Senators for Senators; Batting for Kids; Full Speed Ahead; God Is Nonpartisan; IRS Trustbusters; Final Sentence?; Don't Fear Clinton; New Peace Proposal; Endnotes
Republican panhandling, teams join drug war, prayers for civility
IRS trustbusters. IRS criminal investigators are taking aim at trusts-those convenient financial vehicles used for estate planning, charitable giving, and holding property for minors. With the proliferation of dubious "tax seminars" pushing trusts--pitched widely in local media and on the Internet--the agency suspects that fraud is getting out of hand. The IRS receives more than 3 million trust returns each year, say tax officials, and as many as 200,000 of those are not legit. Among the more suspicious trusts are those claiming to make living expenses deductible and to allow charitable deductions for payments to family members.
Final sentence? Time is running out for the U.S. Sentencing Commission. The powerful panel that sets guidelines for federal prison terms will run out of members if senators do not fill vacancies before adjourning. Some in the Clinton administration favor a North Carolina prosecutor, Janice McKenzie Cole, to head the agency, but insiders predict that the nod will go to a judge favored by senior Senate Democrats--either William Sessions, a Vermonter advocated by his state's Patrick Leahy, or David Mazzone, a Massachusetts choice of Ted Kennedy.
Don't fear Clinton. Republican pollster Frank Luntz has odd advice for GOP candidates: Ignore polls showing high job approval ratings for President Clinton. He says those polls simply show that people are happy with the economy and the direction of the nation. "If you really want to know what people think of Clinton, then turn to the trust and confidence polls. There, he's at 28 percent to 30 percent," said Luntz. "Republicans should not be afraid of Clinton."
New peace proposal. To break the deadlock in the Mideast peace process, President Clinton will see Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in separate White House meetings this week. One new twist is a joint U.S.-Israeli proposal for Arafat's Palestinian Authority to take control of all mosques in the West Bank and Gaza, depriving the militant Hamas group of its top recruiting ground for suicide bombers.
Endnotes. The Navy is buying just seven new ships a year, worrying officials that the once vaunted 600-ship fleet will have just 180 ships in 20 years. . . . Ann Coulter, author of the surprise bestselling impeachment guidebook High Crimes and Misdemeanors, advised the House Republican "Theme Team" that President Clinton's multiple scandals cry out for impeachment. . . . The White House's next move to kill an impeachment inquiry will be to claim that Rep. Henry Hyde's divided Judiciary Committee is a poor copy of the Nixon impeachment panel, which set high standards for fairness and took care in releasing evidence. . . . The new White House State Dining Room rug--paid for with private funds--cost $113,031 and will be delivered in January.
E-mail address: whispers@usnews.com
"You have opened a new era in promoting explicit sexual materials." Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, complimenting Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's wide distribution of his report on President Clinton's trysts with Monica Lewinsky
"I'm a short-timer. What do I care?" Mike McCurry, on his final days as White House spokesperson
"Shmegegge." William Ginsburg, Monica Lewinsky's former lawyer, applying a Yiddish term for "jerk" to President Clinton "I've been able to string more words into fewer ideas than anybody I know." Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, at a Senate hearing
"No one need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." Hillary Rodham Clinton, quoting Holocaust diarist Anne Frank
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