Vice President Dick Cheney Pushed for Scooter Libby Full Pardon.
In the waning days of the Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney launched a last-ditch campaign to persuade his boss to pardon Lewis (Scooter) Libby - and was furious when President George W. Bush wouldn't budge.
Nancy Killefer out as Chief Performance Officer because of--you guessed it--tax issues.
Nancy Killefer withdrew her candidacy to be the first chief performance officer for the federal government on Tuesday, saying she didn't want her bungling of payroll taxes on her household help to become a distraction for the Obama administration...
In a brief letter to President Barack Obama, Killefer, the 55-year-old executive with consulting giant McKinsey & Co., wrote that she had "come to realize in the current environment that my personal tax issue of D.C. unemployment tax could be used to create exactly the kind of distraction and delay" that must be avoided in responding to urgent economic problems...
When Killefer's selection was announced by Obama on Jan. 7, The Associated Press disclosed that in 2005 the District of Columbia government had filed a $946.69 tax lien on her home for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help. Since then, administration officials have refused to answer questions about the tax error, which she resolved five months after the lien was filed...
The AP reported that on March 7, 2005, the D.C. Department of Employment Services slapped a tax lien on her home in the upscale Wesley Heights neighborhood. The local government alleged that beginning three years after she left the high-powered Treasury post she failed to pay unemployment compensation tax for a household employee. She failed to make the required quarterly payments for a year and half, the D.C. government said, whereupon a lien for $946.69 was placed on her home.
That sum included $298 in unpaid taxes, $48.69 in interest and $600 in penalties. Killefer didn't get the lien extinguished for almost five months, until July 29, 2005.
During that period, Killefer and her husband, an economics professor, had two nannies to help care for their teenage son and daughter, and she had a personal assistant to run things when she was on the road, she told Harvard business students back then.
Bobby Tucker, chief of D.C.'s unemployment insurance tax division, said filing tax liens is "not a common practice" for his office. D.C. law authorizes such liens when an employer "neglects and refuses" to pay the levy that helps pay for unemployment benefits for those laid off or fired. Tucker said his auditors have discretion to use tax liens based on "the number of attempts to collect contributions owed, whether or not the employer responds to written attempts, phone calls and-or in-person visits" to collect the tax.
Geez, some things make you throw up a little in your mouth, and then the same things can make you laugh so hard you cry.
This saccharin post by Amanda is a great example.
The Obama campaign became this yelp of hope and love from this country, and even hardened cynics like me got swept up into it. After all these years, we found we had it in us to believe again. The right accuses of us of making Obama some kind of messiah, but that’s not how it’s really experienced. We aggressively believe he’s just one man. We know that we are the real story, the everyday Americans who reached past the cynical destruction of the Bush era into ourselves and found that we do, we really believe that humanity can be better than this. We can transcend racism and sexism and homophobia and all our other petty bigotries. It may not happen in our lifetimes, but we can strive. We can be better. I hope the history books note this, but the brilliance of the Obama campaign was not that they dictated this feeling of movement, but they spotted it and rode the wave. “Yes we can,” became a slogan not because it was demanded on high, but because people responded to it, and the campaign responded to the people. It didn’t feel canned to say it. It felt real, because in a sense, we invented it, not them. On the night of Obama’s election, I went to a party and people did spontaneously chant, “Yes we can! Yes we can!”, and frankly, through all my cynicism, it felt real. They weren’t say that Obama could. After a point, it wasn’t about him. We can. We do believe in this country, and this election proves it.
