■ Carter budget has few friends on Capitol Hill. Minority Leader Rhodes says Carter’s projected $61-billion deficit could easily balloon to $99 billion or more. Rhodes promises that the GOP alternative to Carter’s “fiscal time bomb” will be unveiled shortly. Senator George McGovern termed the budget “a weak response” to needs of cities, farmers, and jobless. Instead of a $25- billion tax cut, McGovern wants to use that money to make a “public investment” of $12 billion in the cities, $7 billion in agriculture, and $6 billion to upgrade the nation’s railroads. … A staff study by the congressional Joint Economic Committee says Carter’s proposed tax cut is appropriate only if supplemented by other policies, such as an additional $7.5 billion in federal outlays and an “immediate and continuing rise in the rate of monetary growth.” . . . Organized labor is so distressed, saying the budget is long on relief for business and short on social programs, that it may precipitate a split with Carter. The break could come at February 20 meeting of the AFL-CIO executive council to be held in Miami. “There is something that can be done, as George McGovern learned in 1972,” one labor official confidently told a reporter from Business Week.
■ The Pennsylvania story is the firing of David Marston. Philadelphia Inquirer published a special twenty-page section on “the Marston affair.” Philadelphia lawyer Henry T. Reath, who raised money for Carter in ’76, says a case can be made for impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Bell. Reath says Bell promised, during his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings, to give the “most careful consideration” to retention of U.S. attorneys on a merit basis—without revealing that he had already made a deal with Judiciary Committee Chairman James Eastland to go along with patronage appointments. . . . Republicans in Minnesota are wondering if the state is heading toward a monarchy. When Muriel Humphrey accepted appointment to her husband’s seat, she joined Wendell Anderson, who stepped down as governor last year to accept appointment by Rudy Perpich, who moved up to governor, to the vacancy created when Mondale quit to become Vice President. Minnesota now has two appointed senators and a non-elected governor and lieutenant governor. . . . United Farm Workers President Cesar Chavez has called off the UFW boycott of table grapes, iceberg lettuce, and Gallo wines, a boycott that had been pretty ineffective for the past three years. “We’re glad they told us,” said a spokesman for the California growers. “Otherwise, we might not have noticed.”




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