Videosyncracies
USA
Today leads with Jimmy Carter going public with his thoughts on the
Clinton fund-raising brouhaha. The New York Times
lead is that the top Republican tax writer in the House will introduce
legislation to radically alter IRS audit and dispute resolution procedures. The
Los
Angeles Times leads with state and local attempts at campaign reform.
The Washington Post goes with Israel's decision to
permit the extradition of a 17-year-old back to Maryland to stand trial for a
gruesome murder, despite his claim that he's an Israeli citizen. This was a
local story that became a national one when Israel's earlier pronouncement that
he could not be extradited had appeared to threaten U.S.-Israeli relations.
On a Sunday CNN broadcast, Carter said that the investigation of Clinton's
fund-raising should be turned over to an independent counsel. According to
USAT , Carter said the scandal has enforced the "not always erroneous"
impression that getting help from Washington requires paying a "legal bribe."
The paper also reports that Rep. Dan Burton said on CBS' "Face the Nation" that
he thinks some of the fund-raising videotapes may have been "altered in some
way," that Sen. Arlen Specter said on Fox News Sunday that video of Clinton
describing how DNC ads were helping him "is proof that he was evading the law,"
and that according to the Newsweek coming out today, at least one fat
cat, Richard Jenrette, has come forward to say Bill Clinton called him up from
the White House to ask for money. The WP has both the Burton and
Jenrette stories, but runs them inside.
The NYT lead explains that Rep. Bill Archer, chairman of the House
Ways and Means Committee, is seizing on the recent uproar over IRS misbehavior
to put forward a legislative evergreen suddenly considered to have a good shot
at passage: a plan to shift the burden of proof in tax disputes from the
taxpayer to the IRS. The move is being strongly opposed by the Clinton
administration and many tax experts on the ground that adopting it would clog
the system, risk a decrease in tax revenues, and force the IRS to become even
more aggressive. The paper points out that the number of people likely to be
affected by the change would be quite small--there are only 2 million audits
annually and only about 1,500 of them end up in court.
Although the line-item veto had been the darling of several Republican
presidents, the Wall Street Journal , after surveying Clinton's targeted
cuts last week of federal subsidies to such corporations as Westinghouse and
3M, complains today that the administration's line-item decision process "can
appear often arbitrary and highly vulnerable to politics." The paper says the
new presidential tool creates "post-season budget playoffs."
A USAT front-page story reports that Honda has developed a virtually
pollution-free gasoline engine that will be as powerful as conventional ones,
and yet not more expensive.
The WP reports on its front page that a high-priority, classified
alert issued by the CIA last August saying that Russia had probably conducted a
nuclear test on an island near the Artic Circle--an alert that resulted in the
formal bawling out of the Russian ambassador to the U.S.--was, in all
likelihood, a mistake. What the CIA detected, it turns out, was an
earthquake.
Despite such laws as the new federal anti-stalker statute, the NYT
reports that New York State inmates are able to get home addresses of parties
connected to crimes they were convicted of, as well as crime scene photos of
victims via the state Freedom of Information Act. Civil liberties groups, says
the paper, vow to fight any reduction in a prisoner's right to file FOIA
requests.
Back to the NYT story on restraining the IRS: There's exactly one
example given of the kinds of cases the revision would apply to, and it speaks
volumes about the sort of people Republican tax reformers and/or Times
reporters and editors most naturally think of: "...cases where the taxpayer and
the IRS presented conflicting but equally credible evidence--for example, the
value of a painting given to a museum..."
