Daschle Claims Questionable Tax Credit for DC Home

Talon News | August 13, 2003 | By Jeff Gannon

[El Laton Caliente]

That stuff is in the New York abode that our tax dollars ARE paying for...

[Howlin]

Where is the fourth one?

[concerned about politics]

You're right about Bill buying a place in Ireland but, to my knowledge, hers is the only one they own in DC.

But....but....they're married. They're loving husband and wife! The properties are "theirs" ( even though they don't, you know, ever "do it." Bill has his liberal scanks, and Hillary the lesbian camp in NY).

[concerned about politics]

Where is the fourth one?

Above their library, NY, DC, and Ireland.

[tgslTakoma]

Looks can be deceiving at first glance. Her neighborhood is very secure. And it's not just because she lives there; there are numerous embassies on her block, and all have the best security - courtesy of the taxpayer-funded US government.

[Howlin]

Oh, I forgot about the OVERSEAS one.

[Howlin]

I understand that; I figured that the SS okayed it because it's on a dead end, but still, you don't SEE anything the least bit discouraging when you ride by there.

My house is twice as far from the street; and judging from the outside, it's bigger.......LOL.

[concerned about politics]

Oh, I forgot about the OVERSEAS one.

Yeh. I'd like to know the size of that one. Probably a renovated castle.

[Howlin]

He can keep all his "gifts" from foreign countries over there, right? Then Hillary won't have to declare them on her Senate what do you call it forms, where they have to declare anything above $50 a year -- for BOTH of them.

[BOBTHENAILER]

Ah, life is good! ;-)

It's all gonna catch-up to little tommy.

Life is indeed good, because that is now happening.

[concerned about politics]

He can keep all his "gifts" from foreign countries over there, right? Then Hillary won't have to declare them on her Senate what do you call it forms, where they have to declare anything above $50 a year -- for BOTH of them.

Heeeeeeyyyyy. "They" can use their own money, can't they? If the monies come from Bill, in Ireland, from his terrorist supported bank account, that America can't track............Criminy!

Bill IS the anti-Christ!!!!!

[rabidralph]

Thanks, for the correction.

[Night Hides Not]

I think FOX news ought to run a "special senate" section on their nightly news segment and highlight stuff like this, so more people understand just how self-serving these people truly are...Top 5% - let's hear the breakdown of exactly WHAT our senators are making in income, how they get tax breaks and then let them try to chisle us out of a measley tax cut!

Great idea, princess!!! Knowing that several at Fox news are regular visitors, if we keep bringing this up, it may come to fruition.

IMHO, empirical evidence suggests that if Barbara Olsen was a Freeper, numerous other notable conservatives Freep or lurk.

BEEP...BEEP...BEEEP.....

My early warning system detects the potential presence of the dreaded Albuturkey.

MAN YOUR STATIONS!!!!!!!!!!!! MISSILE AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!

...nothing better than the smell of charred Albuturkey at any time of day...

[.cnI redruM]

no wonder he doesn't favor tax cuts....
he has ways to get out of paying.....
of course, it all makes sense now.

[Liz]

I’m Linda, Fly Me
(Tom Daschle: Ambitions grounded by his wife’s baggage)
laweekly | 01/17/2003 | by Doug Ireland

The real reason Tom Daschle didn’t run for president.

The national press corps didn’t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’
Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated
that he couldn’t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda
Daschle has been one of the airline industry’s top lobbyists for two decades — when she
wasn’t busy running the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which explains why,
just 11 days after the 9/11 attacks, her husband rushed through the Democratic Senate,
which he controlled, the $15 billion bailout for the airline industry, a notorious taxpayer
rip-off.

Right after then-Congressman Tom Daschle dumped his first wife for a younger, prettier
one, the former Miss Kansas Linda Daschle went to work as chief lobbyist for the Air
Transport Association the airline industry’s main lobby; she then became the senior vice
president of the American Association of Airport Executives; and these days hangs her
hat at the pricey top Washington law/lobby shop Baker, Donelson, Bearman & Caldwell,
headed by former GOP Senate leader and ex–Reagan chief of staff Howard Baker —
where she peddles influence on behalf of a long list of lucrative aviation clients.

The clients for whom Linda lobbied brought more than $5.86 million into Baker,
Donelson in one three-year period, including Northwest Airlines ($870,000 from 1997
through 2001) and American Airlines ($1.26 million in fees). Northwest was already
teetering on the edge of bankruptcy even before 9/11. American, which has had six fatal
crashes since 1994 (not counting 9/11) and has been repeatedly fined by the FAA for a
skein of safety violations, had the reputation as the most unsafe major U.S. carrier.

Yet these two clients of Linda Daschle’s got nearly $1 billion from the airline bailout her
husband pushed into law — thanks to which Northwest (which was the second largest
contributor to Senator Daschle’s 1998 campaign, and which scooped up $404 million in
government cash) actually posted a $19 million profit in the third quarter after the
twin-towers attacks. And, as the lone senator to vote against the bailout, Illinois GOPer
Peter Fitzgerald, decried, “The only people who got bailed out were the shareholders.

The 1 million airline employees were left twisting in the wind.” So much for the populist
noises that occasionally come from Senator Daschle’s mouth. The Daschles also made
sure that the bailout exempted American (which has consistently lobbied against tougher
airline safety standards) and other carriers with lousy safety records from any real liability
to lawsuits from the families of 9/11 victims. Moreover, the General Accounting Office
found that the airline industry’s representations to Congress to secure the bailout
overstated its anticipated losses from 9/11 by as much as $5 billion.

Before 9/11, Senator Daschle pushed through the sleazy deal in the backrooms of Capitol
Hill that forced the FAA to buy defective baggage scanners from one of Linda’s other
clients, L-3 International (from which Linda’s firm raked in $440,000 in the ’97–’01
period). Under a provision Linda’s husband had slipped into the 2000 budget for the U.S.
Department of Transportation (DOT), the FAA was required to buy one of L-3’s scanners
for every one it purchased from the company’s competitors. The L-3 scanners were found
to be substandard by DOT’s inspector general; FAA tests of the scanners showed high
failure rates; and most have not yet been installed because of their defects (the one at the
Dallas–Fort Worth airport — another of Linda’s clients — leaked radiation), which is a
major reason DOT says it won’t be able to screen all luggage for explosives for years to
come.

In one of those corporate-coddling moves for which the Clinton administration became
infamous, President Bubba appointed Linda Daschle deputy administrator of the FAA,
putting her in charge of regulating her once-and-future clients; and she wound up running
the agency as acting administrator. This, of course, significantly boosted the Daschle
family income by hyping the amount Linda could charge her clients when she left
government service. She didn’t wait long to cash in. Example: While running the FAA,
she awarded Loral Space Technologies (a major Democratic contributor that figured in
the ’96 campaign-finance scandals) a nearly $1 billion contract from the federal
government; after Linda passed through the revolving door to Baker, Donelson, Loral
paid the lobby shop $740,000 in 2000-2001 for Linda’s services. When the FAA was
pondering making mandatory a criminal-background check for all airport employees,
Linda, who was then running the agency, vigorously opposed this common-sense move
— echoing the position of the airline-industry lobby that had previously employed her.

A particularly odiferous episode involved charges that the senator and his wife had tried
to sabotage safety inspections of an air-charter firm owned by Murl Bellew, a Daschle
family friend who taught Tom how to fly. The scandal erupted and triggered an official
investigation when a Bellew small plane chartered by the Indian Health Service crashed
in North Dakota, killing the pilot and three doctors en route to an Indian-reservation
clinic.

Forest Service inspectors had been arguing that Bellew’s firm should be banned from
getting government contracts because the operation had been unsafe for years. Senator
Daschle obligingly pushed legislation taking the Forest Service out of the business of
inspecting small-plane carriers, and senior FAA bureaucrats said Linda had also tried to
submarine a proposal to train Forest Service inspectors to conduct FAA investigations.
An FAA inspector reported a cover-up: Documents showing the Daschles’ assiduous
efforts to minimize inspections of Bellew’s planes were shredded by FAA officials under
Linda’s thumb. While an I.G. report failed to find Linda guilty of any lawbreaking,
there’s an old saying in Washington: The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the real scandal is
what’s legal.

It’s a sign of how lazy, blinkered and source-coddling the Beltway’s national press corps
is when one considers that none of all this made the dissections of the senator’s
presidential withdrawal — even though a tough piece by the Washington Monthly’s
Stephanie Mencimer in the January 2002 issue laying out much of it was still on
newsstands. As she observed, “It doesn’t take Lee Atwater to see how Mrs. Daschle’s
professional life might play out in a nasty re-election or presidential campaign: ‘Sen.
Daschle’s wife lobbyist for nation’s most dangerous airline,’ or ‘majority leader’s wife
lobbied to make airlines less safe.’”

Linda Daschle has tried to pooh-pooh her obvious conflicts of interest as an influence
peddler, telling The New York Times last August that the staff members she lobbies “are
pretty junior and may or may not know who I am” — a mind-boggling, risible assertion.
But her senator/leader husband has always refused to make public his and his wife’s tax
returns, despite repeated press requests. As a presidential candidate, Tom Daschle could
not have avoided giving the press a look at those returns — which would have spelled out
just how much cash Linda brings in from her clients.

And that, children, was the ticking time bomb that would inevitably have exploded if the
senator had sought the White House — and is the bottom-line reason he chose not to run.

[Helms]

My belief is that DC is the Versailles of the 21st century and also that some sort of term limitation needs to be placed on Congress, otherwise they will continue to use DC
as a stepping stone to become multimillionaires,which is not the purpose of holding the office.

[Vinnie]

Trying to remember the controversy over Gephardt's house on the Outer Banks (Wave, I think).

He was getting a tax break as the primary residence and in reality only rented out the house.

He quietly righted the situation when he discovered the discrepancy (read he got caught).

[talleyman]

Bump!

[BillF]

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Sen. Tom Daschle's (D-SD) new Washington home has been giving the Senate minority leader headaches [snip] the palatial French colonial [emphasis added]

You were right. He is from South France.