Tamrazmatazz
Roger Tamraz leads at the Washington Post --and grabs plenty of front-page space
elsewhere. The New York Times leads with the guilty pleas entered
by three Teamsters officials in connection with a scheme to launder
union-election contributions. The shake-up announced at China's Communist Party
congress leads at the Los Angeles Times , and USA Today
goes with the record surpluses accumulating in state coffers.
Tamraz, a naturalized American citizen from Lebanon, told the Thompson
hearings that the only reason he gave $300,000 to the DNC was so he could gain
high-level government support for a pet project. This sort of statement of the
obvious is known in Washington as "candor," and especially because Tamraz
showed up without a lawyer and smiled and laughed throughout the day, his brand
of it was enthusiastically received by the powers that be, including the
newspapers. The WP says he "entertained" the committee, and the
NYT notes his quickness with one-liners. The picture running with the
NYT story makes it look as if Tamraz was feeling the tremendous pressure
of a prosecutorial grilling. But in fact, the only sort of question he had to
answer was: Did you get your money's worth? ("Next time, I'll give $600,000,"
was his reply.) The WP picture of the witness table is more in line with
reality: Just a bunch of rich guys in suits having fun. (To get SLATE's take on the Thompson hearings, read Jacob Weisberg's daily
dispatches.)
The NYT details how three top campaign aides to Teamsters President
Ron Carey pleaded guilty yesterday to funneling illegal contributions to
Carey's re-election drive. The three stated that their scheme--disguising
improper contributions to Carey from the AFL-CIO and other unions--involved
officials of the DNC and of the president's re-election campaign.
USAT brings news that state treasuries are billions of dollars in the
black, primarily because the economy's surge has boosted tax revenues and
shrunk welfare rolls. Just about the only exception is Hawaii, which is
experiencing a nasty recession because (Japanese) tourism is down. The paper
reports that in general, the states are reacting conservatively, plowing most
of the found money into tax cuts, schools, and contingency funds.
The LAT says that President Jiang Zemin firmly established himself as
China's top leader with the appointments of allies and nonappointments of
rivals announced Thursday. This story also runs above the fold at the WP
and the NYT 's national edition.
In the business and finance news box of the Wall Street Journal , there's word (credited to yesterday's
Detroit News ) that in a move to retain white-collar employees, Chrysler
is offering 15,000 nonunion salaried workers a grant of $4,000 for
family-related expenses like elder care and children's college tuition.
The LAT front page gives an early picture of a stratagem sure to
become popular among advocates of affirmative action in college admissions. The
Latino Eligibility Task Force, composed of University of California faculty and
administrators from all nine of its campuses, warns that continued use of the
SAT test as an admissions criterion could mean a drop of up to 70 percent in
the number of Latino students at UCLA and Berkeley, the system's two most
selective campuses. But the committee has a solution: eliminate the SAT as a
requirement, which would "more than double the number of Latinos eligible for
admissions." Surprisingly, given that Prop. 209 architect Ward Connerly is on
the U.C. Board of Regents, the paper reports that the regents are "receptive"
to the idea.
Al Kamen's WP column states that, when Sen. John Ashcroft took to the
Senate floor on Wednesday to argue for defunding the NEA, he quoted approvingly
from the work of NEA critic and frequent LAT contributor Jan Breslauer.
Kamen points out that Ashcroft didn't mention Breslauer also recently wrote a
piece for Playboy called "Stacked Like Me" describing her recent
decision to perk up her boring life by getting 34D breast implants. Kamen's
piece appears under the subhead "Ashcroft Takes on Two Endowments."
A question for Post copy editors: Shouldn't that be "Three"?
