Hi choosie,
There was a melee here last night and I'm going to do my best to see that it was the last one we have here. This is intended to be a place for friendly talk, not namecalling and insults. SI Bob is watching very closely and is considering suspensions for a number of the combatants here. I'm hoping to head that off by asking everyone who participated last night to line up and shake hands, then settle down.
Yeah, the burn pile sounds like the better choice. <gg>
I read this in today's New York Times. Personally, I'm glad Clinton will be paying for these gifts and am delighted that he'll be contributing substantially to the extraordinary rent on his office space. Now the Right has been defused on this issue (I've bolded one paragraph):
February 3, 2001 Single-Page Format
Clintons to Repay $86,000 to Gift Givers of
Last Year
By CARL HULSE with JOYCE WADLER
ASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — After days
of widespread criticism, former
President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton said today that they would
pay for $86,000 in gifts they received last year
and that Mr. Clinton's presidential foundation
would share the cost of his new office space in
Midtown Manhattan.
The moves came as Mr. Clinton stepped up
his defense of his pardon of the fugitive
financier Marc Rich, who had been accused of
one of the largest tax evasions in the nation's
history. Among the gift-givers to be repaid is
Denise Rich, Mr. Rich's ex-wife and an
important Democratic campaign contributor
who last year gave the Clintons two coffee
tables and two chairs valued at $7,375.
The former first couple had been heavily
criticized since leaving the White House after
the disclosure that they received $190,000 in
flatware, furnishings, art and other gifts from
friends and admirers in Hollywood, New
York and elsewhere — $86,000 of it during
the last year of Mr. Clinton's presidency.
In a joint statement from the president's transition office, Mr. Clinton said
they were paying for the gifts received last year to try to remove any
suggestion of impropriety.
"To eliminate even the slightest question, we are taking the step of paying
for gifts given to us in 2000," Mr. Clinton said in the statement.
Senator Clinton said separately in the statement that "I believe the step
we are taking today reaffirms that I am fully committed to being the best
senator I can possibly be for the people of New York."
A barrage of criticism about the gifts and the office overshadowed the
Clintons' first weeks out of the White House and Mrs. Clinton's first days
as the junior senator from New York. The gifts were portrayed — in
newspaper editorials, by some of Mrs. Clinton's new Congressional
colleagues, and on a special Thursday night edition of NBC's "Saturday
Night Live" — as a last-minute effort to cash in on the presidency.
Her Senate spokesman, James E. Kennedy, said that the Clintons would
write checks to each of the 27 donors whose gifts the Clintons took with
them as they left the White House to furnish their new homes in
Chappaqua, N.Y., and Washington.
The items include nearly $4,920 in china from the filmmaker Steven
Spielberg and his wife, the actress Kate Capshaw; another $4,790 in
china from the actress Mary Steenburgen and her husband, the actor Ted
Danson; and flatware valued at $4,970 from Mr. and Mrs. Morris
Pynoos of Beverly Hills, Calif., major donors to the Democratic Party.
The Clintons will keep — without reimbursing the givers — nearly
$104,000 in gifts received before last year. "As have other presidents
and their families before us, we received gifts over the course of our eight
years in the White House and followed all the gift rules," Mr. Clinton said
in the statement.
His decision to open his presidential offices on the 56th floor of the
Carnegie Hall Tower at 152 West 57th St., which features sweeping
views of Central Park, has been criticized by Republicans in Congress
and even some of Mr. Clinton's friends. The offices will take up the entire
floor, at an estimated annual rent of $650,000.
Speaking at an impromptu news conference on a sidewalk at Park
Avenue and East 54th Street after a meeting nearby to discuss relief
efforts for victims of the Indian earthquake, Mr. Clinton said his
Presidential Library Foundation would pay part of the rent.
An aide later said the foundation's share would
be $300,000 a year. That would reduce the
public's share to a level roughly equal to the
rent paid for former President Ronald
Reagan's offices in Los Angeles.
Even so, Mr. Clinton wanted to make the
point that he — and the public — had gotten a
pretty good deal on the office space.
"The General Services Administration is
charged with approving the lease; they tell us
what the price is in Manhattan. Everybody
knew it was more expensive than anything
else," Mr. Clinton said. "They said the actual
price I got was below a lot of the market
prices in Manhattan and a decent price."
Saying that he did not want the taxpayers to
shoulder the extra expense, Mr. Clinton said
he would do part of his foundation work in the
offices and allocate a percentage of that
budget to the rent.
"I've got my staff working on it and we're going to work it out so that the
taxpayers pay for the New York office on a square-foot basis is about
what President Reagan pays, somewhere in that range," he said.
Mr. Clinton did not mention, though, that Mr. Reagan's $285,000 office
costs for this year are the highest of any former president.
"I'm not going to let the taxpayer get gigged on this," Mr. Clinton said.
"But, I mean, it's New York. I also pay higher taxes in New York and
I'm glad to be here. But I don't want the taxpayer to get taken for a ride
on the lease."
In Washington, Representative Ernest Istook, a Republican of Oklahoma
who heads the House Appropriations subcommittee that handles the
budget for former presidents, said Mr. Clinton's remarks today were "a
step in the right direction" but that they "don't solve the problem."
"Even if he got people to donate $300,000 a year, he's still asking
taxpayers to pay $400,000 every year for his presidential penthouse,"
Mr. Istook said. "At this point, I don't even know if the foundation has
that much in their bank account for one year, much less for multiple
years."
Mr. Clinton also defended his pardon of Mr. Rich, the commodities
trader who has lived in Switzerland for 17 years while facing charges of
mail fraud, racketeering, income tax evasion and trading oil with Iran in
violation of a trade embargo. Mr. Rich's former wife, Denise, has given
more than $1 million to the Clintons and Democratic causes.
Asked if Mr. Rich had been pardoned by political reasons, Mr. Clinton
said, "Absolutely not."
He noted that he had pardoned "about as many people" as former
President Reagan and "far fewer" than former Presidents Jimmy Carter
and Gerald R. Ford.
Mr. Clinton said he pardoned Mr. Rich only on the condition that he
"would waive all his defenses to the same sort of civil action the
government took against everybody."
"If he presents himself for that, if I'm wrong and he shouldn't have been
pardoned, the government can go against him like they could everybody
else," Mr. Clinton said. "Otherwise, they would never have had the
chance to do that, so in my view you get the best of both worlds here." |
