-Caveat Lector- from; http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Impeached POTUS Run for your life, it's Queen Thong by Mark Steyn YESTERDAY I climbed into my steel reinforced underwear, staked out my hotel lobby, and was rewarded with another glimpse of the temporarily interned intern. Monica is ample, but she's not Godzilla, she's not King Kong or even Queen Thong. Yet grown senators are fleeing in terror: "Run for your life!" cry terrified Republicans. "She's gonna talk about cigars in the well of this august body." "She's been interviewed 22 times," scream petrified Democrats. "She has nothing new to add. Aarggh!" Thump! Thump! Thump! Queen Thong's pounding down the Mall, she's climbing up the Capitol dome, she's tossing Republican senators around like matchsticks, she's snapping their spines and hurling them to the ground . . . Oh, hang on. Republican senators don't have any spines. In public, the Democrats' position is that Monica won't reveal anything new; in private, they worry that, even if she reads out the phone book, just her girly, giggly voice on the witness stand will emphasise what the President did - he didn't just pleasure himself with her, he manoeuvred her into legal jeopardy and conscripted her into his obstruction of justice. Of course, these offences pale beside Monica's: she threatens the dignity of the Senate. So, as in 1950s sci-fi movies like Invasion of the August Body Snatchers, a remote, close-knit community cowers before the world's most terrifying unemployed 25-year-old airhead. The US Senate, like everything else in Washington, has now taken on the forlorn character of President Clinton's sex life: it's nervous about reaching "completion". Late on Monday, The World's Greatest Deliberative Body was solemnly deliberating whether to move a Democrat motion to dismiss, a Republican motion to dismiss the motion to dismiss, Senator Trent Lott's motion to dismiss all debate on the motion to dismiss, Senator Russell Feingold's motion to dismiss the motion to dismiss and split it into two motions to dismiss twice, or - in a spirit of bipartisan compromise - a motion to dismiss the motion to dismiss the motion to dismiss and instead split it into two motions - one to convict the President and one not to dismiss him. I may have missed a couple: the Senate produces more motions than a gallon of extra-strength Ease-O-Lax. But they are, in every sense, just going through the motions. Yesterday, after the move to dismiss, they moved to dat miss - Monica Lewinsky - and the vexed question of live witnesses. Bill McCollum made the case for the House impeachment managers: he's the one who looks like Leslie Crowther, if you can imagine Leslie Crowther cross-examining interns about who put whose Crackerjack pencil where. Betty Currie was not on the list of potential witnesses, having been vetoed by Republican senators who feared that the sight of House prosecutors questioning a black woman would unnerve the American people. Presumably, most of them have never seen a white Republican man talking to an African-American woman. The President must be kicking himself for not hitting on the black interns: if Monica were a person of colour, those guilt-ridden Senate honkies wouldn't dare call her. Meanwhile, as Monica waddles towards the chamber, Democrats do their best to toss any old obstacle in her path. Iowa's Senator Tom Harkin maintains that House Republicans should not have interviewed her because the Constitution reserves "the sole right of impeachment" to the Senate. The House managers have no right leaning on witnesses when the Constitution reserves the sole right to lean on witnesses to the President. Other Democrats are disputing the expenses claims, demanding to know what it cost taxpayers to put Monica up in this hotel. The Office of Independent Counsel has said it only paid "the government rate" for the room. "Monica's staying in the Presidential Suite for $5,000 a night!" says one Democrat. "She's staying in the Presidential Suite for $10,000 a night!" roars another 10 minutes later. Who knows? Maybe 5,000 bucks is "the government rate". The hotel management tells me only that she was in "a secure suite". "You mean," I ask, with a shudder, "I'm in an insecure suite?" Whether or not the suite's insecure, I certainly am. I'm never going to get a room upgrade until I get a subpoena from Ken Starr. The London Telegraph, Jan. 27, 1999 Impeached POTUS Social Security Socialism by Milton Friedman President Clinton proposed in his State of the Union address that a quarter of the funds set aside for Social Security be invested in the stock market--a truly radical plan. Margaret Thatcher reversed Britain's drift to socialism by selling off government-owned enterprises. President Clinton now proposes that the U.S. government do precisely the opposite: buy private equities, thereby becoming part-owner of U.S. enterprises. I have often speculated that an ingenious way for a socialist to achieve his objective in the U.S. would be to persuade Congress, in the name of fiscal responsibility, to (1) fully fund obligations under Social Security, and (2) invest the accumulating reserves in the private-capital market by purchasing equity interests in domestic corporations. Congress has never adopted a policy of full funding of Social Security, but neither has it adopted a strict pay-as-you-go policy. As is Congress's wont, it has chosen the middle of the road where cars can hit you from both directions. It has collected more in current taxes than were needed to pay current benefits, yet not enough more to equal the future liability that it was incurring. The excess revenue has been spent in the ordinary course of government business. However, to preserve the fiction that Social Security is insurance, federal government interest-bearing bonds of a corresponding amount have been deposited in a so-called trust fund. That is, one branch of the government, the Treasury, has given an interest-bearing IOU to another branch, the Social Security Administration. Each year thereafter, the Treasury gives the Social Security Administration additional IOUs to cover the interest due. The only way that the Treasury can redeem its debt to the Social Security Administration is to borrow the money from the public, run a surplus in its other activities or have the Federal Reserve print the money--the same alternatives that would be open to it to pay Social Security benefits if there were no trust fund. But the accounting sleight-of-hand of a bogus trust fund is counted on to conceal this fact from a gullible public. At the end of 1997 the value of the trust fund totaled $656 billion. The unfunded liability for old age, survivor and disability benefits (the present value of the excess of future estimated benefits over future estimated tax receipts) is variously estimated as anywhere from $4 trillion to $11 trillion. For perspective, the total market value of all domestic corporations in the U.S. at the end of 1997 was roughly $13 trillion. Suppose the president's proposed policy had been followed in its most extreme form from the outset of Social Security in 1937, i.e., that the whole excess of Social Security tax receipts over Social Security benefit payments, and not just one-quarter, had been invested in the stock market. Offhand, it looks as if the trust fund would own only about 5% of all domestic corporations ($656 billion out of $13 trillion). But that is too simple. Most of the accruing funds would have been invested at far lower stock prices than those that prevailed as of the end of 1997. Suppose that stock prices, dividend yields, Social Security tax receipts, and Social Security benefit payments had all been what they were--that is, not affected by the investment of Social Security funds in stocks instead of government bonds. On that assumption, the trust fund at the end of 1997 would have totaled not $656 billion but more than 10 times as much, approximately $7 trillion. In that case, the Social Security trust fund would own more than half of all domestic corporations! To return to my socialist fantasy, full funding would long since have brought complete socialism. That too is too simple. Neither stock prices nor other economic magnitudes could have behaved as they actually did, with so much extra money flowing into the market. But what this calculation demonstrates is (1) the widely recognized fact of how much better equity stocks are as an investment than government bonds and (2) how seriously the government purchase of private securities would threaten our freedom. Have we not learned from the experience of the past century that private property is the key bulwark of personal freedom? Has that experience not shown how dangerous it is to transfer a larger and larger fraction of the productive assets of the country into the hands of a government bureaucracy? If the corresponding sums had been accumulated by private individuals and not used to finance government spending, they would have been a real addition to the nation's capital and not just a bookkeeping entry. Those sums would have been invested in ways citizens or their advisers chose. The end result would have been more productive investment, a larger stream of income and a freer, more responsible, more productive society. The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 26, 1999 The Religion Business Those Burning Black Churches Why did the Anti-Defamation League Make a Payoff to Lyons? LARGO, Fla. (AP) — As the Rev. Henry Lyons accepted a $225,000 check to rebuild burned black churches, he told the Anti-Defamation League the money would go immediately to "the wheels that are squeaking the loudest.'' Instead, prosecutors say, Lyons deposited $60,000 into a savings account, gave $12,000 to his wife, sent money to love interests in Tennessee and Indiana and spent part of the money to redecorate his house and pay off credit card bills. "We believed all the money had been expeditiously distributed to the churches in need of rebuilding,'' Mark Medin, director of national leadership of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, told jurors at Lyons' trial today. Lyons, president of the National Baptist Convention USA, is charged with racketeering and grand theft, accused of swindling money from corporations seeking to do business with the convention and stealing funds from the ADL intended to rebuild black churches. Medin said ADL leaders first began questioning where the money went when they received telephone calls from reporters in the St. Petersburg area. Lyons accepted the money at the ADL's annual meeting in 1996, when a cluster of church arson fires, many of them involving predominantly black churches in the South, was making headlines. Jurors today saw a videotape made of the ceremony. "We immediately determined where these funds should go, and the wheels that are squeaking the loudest at this point in time, we will give the funds to those churches,'' Lyons said on the tape. Medin said Lyons followed up two weeks later with a letter saying six burned churches had received $35,000 each and there were more churches still in need. The ADL then forwarded him another check for $19,500, Medin said. Lyons is charged with grand theft in the handling of the ADL funds. He and codefendant Bernice Edwards both are charged with racketeering, accused of devising elaborate schemes to divert more than $4 million from corporations seeking to do business with church members. Prosecutors say they used the funds to buy themselves expensive homes, diamond jewelry and luxury cars. Opening arguments in the trial were given Monday. In his defense, his lawyers argued that just because a business deal did not succeed doesn't mean a crime was committed. They said some of ADL money was held in bank accounts simply because Lyons hadn't decided yet how to distribute it. Ms. Edwards' attorney described her as a naive and uneducated homemaker who was struggling to make ends meet. Associated Press, Jan. 26, 1999 Impeached POTUS Clinton's Lawyer Is a Liar, Too by Dick Morris EVEN as the impeachment trial grinds to a close and the president prepares to show his remorse by dancing on its grave, the White House has introduced us to yet another liar in this long, tawdry process - Charles Ruff, President Clinton's lawyer. Throughout the proceedings, defense lawyers Ruff and Cheryl Mills have shown about the same regard for the truth as their famous client. Charles Ruff was originally slated to be Clinton's attorney general - until it was revealed that, for years, he had not paid the federal nanny tax for his household help. Clinton quickly dumped him, but years later brought him in as counsel to the president, a position which did not require Senate confirmation and conveniently avoided any airing of his deliberate and embarrassing tax evasion. Cheryl Mills was the subject of a congressional referral to the Justice Department which accused her of perjury and obstruction of justice in congressional proceedings. Sound familiar? She can truly feel Clinton's pain; she's been there, done that. Some of Ruff's lies are laughs - like his earnest contentions that the DNA test had nothing to do with the president's belated decision to come clean about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Particularly humorous was his straight-faced statement that Clinton paid $850,000 to Paula Jones not because he was guilty but because he didn't have the time to deal with a case that had already been dismissed. In Ruff's shamelessly duplicitous argument before Congress, he deliberately lied about Betty Currie's status in the Paula Jones case. House Manager Asa Hutchison skillfully exposed that lie. Ruff also claimed that he did not know whether the president had actually ever had any conversations with me about the poll which I conducted for him about the Monica Lewinsky matter on Jan. 21, 1998. Unfortunately for Ruff, the president's own sworn written testimony - prepared by the same Charles Ruff - admits the conversations and exposes that lie. But like his client, Ruff remembers only what is convenient. During Ruff's presentation, he claimed that the president had no illicit intentions in his ''coaching'' of Betty Currie because, as he put it, ''Betty Currie was never an actual or prospective witness ... In the entire history of the Jones case, Ms. Currie's name had not appeared on any witness list; nor was there any reason to suspect that she would play any role in the Jones case ... In the days following the deposition, the Jones lawyers never listed her, never added her to any witness list.'' Therefore, according to Ruff, the president would have had no motivation to coach Betty because she was of no interest to the Jones lawyers. He was simply refreshing his recollections. (Leave aside for the moment that he was apparently refreshing his recollection by making statements to Betty that he knew - and she knew - were untrue.) Asa Hutchison caught Ruff's blatant lie and powerfully proved it to the Senate. He held up a copy of the subpoena that was actually issued for Betty Currie only a few days after the president's fateful deposition. Ruff knew all about that subpoena, but he lied about it anyway. Then, Hutchison held up the actual witness list, showing Betty Currie's name, which the Jones lawyers had submitted to the Court and to the president's lawyers on Jan. 23, 1998. Ruff knew all about that witness list, but he deliberately lied about that, too. When Ruff was caught, he apologized to the Senate for his ''misleading statement.'' In WhiteHousespeak, that means ''I lied to you and got caught.'' Ruff's co-counsel Cheryl Mills claimed that Betty Currie's testimony about retrieving the president's gifts to Lewinsky was consistent. That depends on what the word ''consistent'' means. Hutchison demonstrated that Betty Currie was actually inconsistent. Only four weeks after she had actually retrieved the gifts from Monica on Dec. 28, 1997, Currie told the FBI that she had picked them up about three months earlier, distancing that event from the Jones subpoena for those gifts in December. Later, she moved it back even further, claiming that it was in the fall of 1997. Finally, Currie admitted that it was sometime in December, 1997. In this White House, that is what passes for consistency. When Ruff was asked about the poll that I conducted for the president, and our telephone call discussing it, he claimed that he had ''no idea whether the conversation ever occurred or not.'' Once again, Ruff lied. When the president responded to the eighty-one questions from the House Managers, he admitted that the poll was taken and that he discussed it with me in telephone calls. Not only did Ruff know all about the president's sworn answers, he was the one who prepared them and certified that they were true and accurate. Ruff also supervised the provision of White House documents to Kenneth Starr - including records of telephone calls from the president to me during the relevant time period. Ruff knew about that, too, but he lied, anyway. If his own client admitted, under oath, that the conversation between the president and me did, indeed, take place and that I did, indeed, conduct a poll, why would Ruff try to suggest otherwise? While one cannot blame Ruff for being skeptical of the veracity of his own client's assertions, we can assume that any admission adverse to the president's interests would likely be true. Ruff tried to wish away the poll because he wanted to avoid calling attention to the undeniable fact that the president himself was masterminding and coordinating the White House cover-up of the Lewinsky matter. Most of all, Ruff knew about that. The New York Post, Jan. 26, 1999 Impeached POTUS Hubbell Indictment Reinstated Bribes from Clinton friends A U.S. federal appeals court gave independent counsel Kenneth Starr a victory Tuesday, reinstating tax evasion charges against Webster Hubbell, a longtime friend of President Clinton and the first lady. The appeals court panel ruled that a federal judge was wrong to dismiss the indictment against the former top U.S. Justice Department official on the grounds that the case exceeded the independent counsel's jurisdiction. In throwing out the tax case against Hubbell, U.S. District Judge James Robertson said Starr had exceeded his authority in bringing the charges and that Starr had unfairly used Hubbell's own financial records against him in assembling evidence against the former associate attorney general. Hubbell had turned over the records to Starr under a limited grant of immunity known as production immunity. The appeals court validated Starr's theory of the case—that he was entitled to bring the charges based on evidence that hundreds of thousands of dollars he was paid by friends of President Clinton may have been "hush money" to ensure his silence in Starr's Whitewater probe. "The timing, sources, and extent of the payments make the belief that they were hush money reasonable," said the appeals court. That suffices to bring the charges, the court added. The appeals court, however, raised questions about the extent to which Starr can rely on the documents he collected from Hubbell in prosecuting the longtime friend of the president. Starr, said the appeals court, must establish that it knew before collecting the documents that they existed. "Unless the Independent Counsel can establish its knowledge of the existence and possession of the documents sought in the subpoena with greater detail and particularity, it will have to live with the consequences of its decision to compel production," the appeals court ruled. Reuters, Jan. 26, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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