Scrapbook
Scrapbook What Goes Around ... House Republicans have now spent roughly $450,000 on television ads blasting eight of their Democratic colleagues for supporting a raid on the Social Security trust...
...And these actions, according to the GAO, "contributed to an appearance that HUD had manipulated the procurement process...
...Here's Robert Byrd during Senate debate on September 21, 1978: "I wish I had the rules of the House over here at times...
...Over the course of 10 weeks Joyner and Smiley used their shows to hammer at CompUSA, calling the company's top executive James Halpin "ebonically challenged" and complaining that CompUSA had an all-white executive board—it didn't...
...The GAO's conclusions affirm, in a devastating way, that Cuomo has been using underhanded tactics to go after Gaffney...
...And House Democrats aired the ads at one of their caucus meetings, so those members who hadn't yet been targeted could figure out a response...
...There are lots of rules over there I would just love to have...
...Indeed, asked about the ads aired during the government shutdown, Gephardt could only say, "I don't remember that...
...Indeed, the report quotes, by name, two HUD officials who handle discrimination complaints as saying Glaser's interference was "unprecedented...
...Hastert has been the driving force behind the ads, and has leaned on Tom Davis, the House GOP campaign chairman, to keep airing them even after Davis's staff expressed concern about the amount of money being expended...
...Surely the report's most revealing finding is the section documenting the number of discrimination complaints filed by all HUD employees...
...Kettle...
...19, between the president and congressional leaders, Clinton complained about the ads to Denny Hastert and Dick Armey...
...After weeks of public pounding, Halpin the other day did what any corporate honcho would do these days— he groveled for two hours with Joyner and Smiley in the law offices of Dallas mayor Ron Kirk...
...Obviously, they haven't heard of the Atkins diet...
...The ads appear to have been successful at beginning to make the Republicans, for the first time ever, the party that defends Social Security...
...At the end of Halpin's radio appearance, Joyner told his listeners, "CompUSA is a good company now...
...The two charged that CompUSA—get this—didn't spend enough money advertising to blacks (perhaps on BET and Joyner's show...
...We're in a new world here, folks...
...Halpin then went on the Tom J^^r Morning Show, said that CompUSA had unwittingly discriminated against blacks, and then promised to hire a black ad agency...
...Readers may recall Matthew Rees's description several months ago in these pages of how Andrew Cuomo, secretary of housing and urban development, had been waging war on HUD's inspector general, Susan Gaffney...
...He had never seen such ads, said the House's minority leader, "when the election's over a year away, to affect the legislative outcome on the floor of the House...
...Gephardt in particular was so hysterical over what he thought was unfair demagoguing that it seems to have affected his memory...
...Beyond Parody Noting that "meat consumption is just as dangerous to public health as tobacco use," the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has recommended that the Justice Department "begin preparing a case against major meat producers and retailers...
...He told him Republicans would run ads in his district only for as long as Democrats ran ads in the district of Todd Tiahrt, a House Republican from Kansas, in 1995-96...
...It's something that some people urged on me four years ago, because I could have done that...
...Some wondered whether Davis was fully committed to the ads, but he put that to rest with his response to Dennis Moore of Kansas, one of the targeted Democrats, who personally complained to him...
...And I'm afraid there are too many senators who feel that we need to get to be like the House...
...The Eternal Robert Byrd One of the overlooked highlights of the debate on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was seeing Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia lecture Trent Lott on Senate rules and decorum, after Lott had denied him the right to speak...
...I didn't think it was the right thing to do...
...House Republicans have now spent roughly $450,000 on television ads blasting eight of their Democratic colleagues for supporting a raid on the Social Security trust fund...
...And I decided it wasn't fair, and I didn't do it...
...21, when Tom Daschle and Richard Gephardt had a joint press conference in which they each gave an opening statement moaning about the ads...
...Byrd didn't take kindly to this, and when given the opportunity to speak delivered 15 minutes of parliamentary rabble rousing...
...And since Gaffney took the inspector general job in 1993, the rate of complaints against that office has been lower than that of the Office of the Secretary, which Cuomo of course has occupied since early 1997...
...It turns out that the rate of complaints filed against Gaffney's office is equal or below that for the rest of HUD...
...A pitfall of a career as long as Byrd's is the length of the paper trail...
...The report found, for example, that HUD's decision to handpick two lawyers to investigate the discrimination charge, and award them contracts totaling $100,000 (the normal cost is about $3,000), represented "significant deviation" from the standard process of investigating discrimination complaints...
...The General Accounting Office has now reviewed the lucrative legal contracts awarded by Cuomo's top aide, Howard Glaser, to investigate charges of racial discrimination lodged against Gaffney...
...Thus the hidden constant of his career: It hardly matters whether you follow House rules or Senate rules so long as Byrd rules...
...At a meeting Tuesday night, Oct...
...The evidence...
...Though no one alleged that consumers had been discriminated against on the basis of race, CompUSA agreed to start discriminating: Black customers who had written to Joyner and Smiley will now receive a 10 percent discount on their next purchase (isn't differential price based on race illegal...
...As for Glaser's role, which had him suspend an investigation already underway and then engineer the hiring of the new legal team (which included two former Clinton administration lawyers)—the GAO characterizes it as "extraordinary...
...Cuomo's Vendetta, Cont...
...The best evidence of all that Democrats are worried came on the morning of Oct...
...The Art of Persuasion Further proof that the secret to success is complaining...
...There's too much of what the House does that we don't need to do in this Senate," said Byrd...
...Yet when a reporter asked Gephardt how he squared his statement with the shellacking the White House handed to Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich over Medicare in 1995, the minority leader suddenly had less to say...
...Tom Joyner, host of a popular, nationally syndicated morning radio show with a predominantly black audience, and Tavis Smiley, a host on the cable network Black Entertainment Television, recently took aim at computer superstore CompUSA...
...Those ads ran for nine months...
...Democrats are going berserk...
...Pot, meet Mr...
...No, better to do the right thing: receive bags of cash from overseas, hit up Buddhist nuns, and rent out the Lincoln Bedroom...
...But that's not all...
...North Dakota Democrats have even started running ads to defend Earl Pomeroy, one of those whose support for Social Security is being challenged...
...Clintonism of the Week "Governor Bush is the first candidate in the history of the modern era, when we've had federal financing, who has given it up so that an unlimited amount of money could be raised, so that puts all the others at, I think, a relative disadvantage...
Vol. 5 • November 1999 • No. 7
