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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (14797)	4/29/1998 12:40:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

Results are just about in on the National Plebiscite on public financing for political campaigns: And it's a landslide AGAINST!!!! WSJ Tax Report MOST PEOPLE VOTE NO on sending tax dollars to politicians. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that only 12.2% of all the individual income-tax returns received through April 17 included a check mark in the box asking if the taxpayer wants to send $3 of taxes to the presidential-election campaign fund. That was down slightly from 12.4% a year earlier and a peak of nearly 29% about 20 years ago. The trend is another reflection of erosion in public esteem for politicians over the past few decades, says Humphrey Taylor, chairman of Louis Harris & Associates, a New York polling firm. Philip J. Wiesner of KPMG Peat Marwick in Washington calls the campaign checkoff "an idea whose time has come and gone." The tax return "is cluttered enough and complicated enough" even without the checkoff, he says. interactive.wsj.com Actually, it is a direct and graphic refutation of the notion that the U.S. public wants public financing of political campaigns.

To: Grainne who wrote (14797)	4/29/1998 2:13:00 PM
From: Don McCauley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

To quote: "Banned by edict from smuggling drugs, the Italian American Mafia missed out on the most lucrative crime wave of the twentieth century. It was left to others to profit from the $100 billion a year market in cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamines. Those best placed, by geography and criminal tradition, were the loose-knit groupings of the South, known to law enforcement as the "Dixie Mafia." ...The Dixie Mafia formed a ring of interlocking interests that covered Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, and above all, Arkansas. Their spiritual capital was Bill Clinton's hometown of Hot Springs, famous for its racetrack, its ornate bathhouses, its casinos, its prostitution, and its epic defiance of Prohibition."