Tilting at Windmills

...world realize that their “duty” does not arise until they have accepted that $100,000 fee from some crooked manufacturer...

...Because the Office of Management and Budget wants a cost-benefit analysis...

...The U.S...

...is not a small child...

...A Californian has finally come up with a way to dole out the revenge lawyers deserve...

...The widespread nature of legislative corruption, long a favorite topic of this column, was the subject of a story that ran on the AP wire on February 6 that did not receive the attention in the big league press I thought it deserved...

...I don’t care if the whole world comes down...

...The most recent payment came in 1986...

...The war in many ways was like a Super Bowl or a thrilling war movie,” one psychologist told The Washington Times, adding: “There were feelings of euphoria and excitement, as in the football game...

...What he did not choose to emphasize is that President Bush is proposing to raise the White House budget by $2 million and hire 20 new permanent staff members...

...offering Gambino a $1.2 million settlement...

...It’s plenty strong enough to take it...

...Even more similar was the pride the Nazis took in their triumph over Poland...

...we realize that a few are truly devoted to justice) has gradually attracted much wider support...

...First came irreverent, or at least more irreverent than The Amer-icun Bur- Associution Journul, professional publications like The Americun Luwyer and The Nutionul LUMJo~u rnul...

...There are already 38 1 permanent White House employees, plus 2,000 more in the Office of the President, plus innumerable others on “detail” from other agencies who are hidden from public scrutiny because their salaries are carried on the rolls of other budgets-most notably the Pentagon’s, historically the largest secret supplier of manpower for the White House...

...While Californians struggle with what the Los Angeles Times calls “an unprecedented budget shortfall,” six state senators took off last month for a trip to Hong Kong and Manila that cost the taxpayers an estimated $2 1,000...

...Erne magazine reports that Clark Clifford, one of Washington’s most prominent citizens for about half a century, may have been fronting for a “criminally tainted, moneylaundering, Luxembourg-based global bank” that secretly controls the First American Bank of Washington, of which Clifford is the chairman...

...Why don’t we...

...This legislative yearning to go abroad is so strong that Roll Call, a tabloid that covers the business of Capitol Hill, has inaugurated a special section called “Travel & Entertainment” featuring articles about “The Unspoiled Bliss of Tortola,” “New St...

...Law” on Japanese television...

...And if that is their justification, ask them just how many poor people in trouble they have defended...

...His story, as told by Laura Kurtzman of the Sun Jose Mercury News, begins with his first victim, Martin Jarvis, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer: Jarvis was having lunch at an Italian restaurant in San Francisco when, writes Kurtzman, “he got an offer he couldn’t refuse...

...The problem is that they don’t have much compunction about lying to civilians in either the Congress or the press...

...From the crush of bodies around a window exit of the USAir plane that crashed in Los Angeles in January, it seems clear that more space between the seats on either side of the exit would have helped the passengers escape...

...In the eighties, we did manage to handle another bad guybuddy in a better way...

...No problem, said Jarvis, who shelled out $13,900 for a suit, tie, gold ring, bracelet, and Piaget watch so his client could negotiate in style...

...Ah, you would think, perhaps there is some hope for me...

...When the secretary of defense resisted efforts to bring mothers of infant children home from the Gulf, the California congresswoman reminded him that during the Vietnam war, “You were exempted from military service because you were the support of your family and obviously felt that your wife and soon-to-be-born child needed you...

...A few weeks ago, a White House source slipped us a hot document entitled “Table 11- 10 Proposed Outlays, by Agency,” pointing out that the biggest increase was for the legislative branch...

...Twenty-one years ago, we revealed that Clifford was fronting for another dubious banking operation, that time at The National Bank of Washington...

...It is clear, after the Gulf briefings, that our military has some pretty smart fellows in it...

...If your answer is 40, that’s the same figure the governor of Maryland came up with...

...It feels a little like telling a small child, beaming in her mother’s high heels, that no, she still looks six and a half...

...It reminds me of the Italians who crowded the streets of Rome to welcome the victorious legions home from Ethiopia...

...Charles Peters...

...Perhaps it would if he did not have a fulltime, well-paid job...

...Bobby Raymond, who got $1 0,000, to say, “I sold way too cheap...

...It pointed out that in recent months, major legislative corruption has been exposed in five states: South Carolina, Texas, California, New York, and Arizona...

...The truth is that the war on Iraq was not much of a test of how our armed forces would do against a good army and a good air force...

...But when he proposed to make it a legal requirement, he was greeted by widespread indignation among Maryland’s civil servants, most of whom, it turns out, actually have been showing up for 35 hours a week and have become accustomed to the pace...

...The result was that we got what we wantedMarcos’s departure and Aquino as president-without bloodshed...

...Now, wellregarded city magazines like Philadelphiu and Wushinytoniun, both of which have run expos& of legal hustlers in recent months,, have joined the cause...

...My duty is to defend my client...

...As in the case of Saddam Hussein, I think we were right, if very slow, to realize we had been aiding a bad guy and to change our policy...

...But thanks to Herbert A. Sample of the McClatchy News Service, we now know that, according to the provisions of a bill pending before the California assembly, it won’t be either...

...One would think it would be both wiser and cheaper to interview them in California, when they knew what the problems had turned out to be, rather than in Hong Kong or Manila, when they could only guess...

...There would be a meeting at Lloyd’s of London, and Gambino didn’t have an attorney or a thing to wear...

...Their only justification for taking such a fee is that they would defend anybody in Why don’t the Sullivans of this trouble...

...If the world comes apart, so be it...

...As it is, he is free to speak out on any issue...

...One has to wonder how we could have so overrated Hussein’s army, knowing that it had taken eight years to gain a draw with the poorly equipped and disorganized Iranians...

...Since the paid engagements are almost all financed by lobbies or other organizations with a selfish interest in congressional action, they usually do little to advance the public interest...

...rather, it was a matter of going his way when the issue seemed a close call to you on the merits...

...It has a picture of April Glaspie over the words “Bitch set me up...

...Unfortunately, the legacy of Reaganism is far too many rigid conservatives throughout the bureaucracy...

...Army have admitted that they paid the former Panamanian dictator more than $300,000...

...An old friend of mine from back home died recently...

...Is it possible that we may have at last found a way to solve the balance of payments problem...

...His name was Sam MacCorkle, and he was one of the last of an always rare and now almost extinct breed, the honest political boss...

...You’re driving on the highway, and suddenly you notice a blue light flashing from a car behind you...

...Have you heard about the t-shirt Saddam Hussein is wearing...

...percent of the post offices visited...

...In this era, where we seem to have a choice between corruption and single-issue, special-interest politics, we desperately need Sam MacCorkles...

...Then The New York Times column by David Margolick...

...One thing the war did was to fill the entertainment gap for Americans for whom the time between the Super Bowl and the beginning of spring training has always loomed as a cultural desert...

...An employee of General Electric had plowed into the family Mercedes and the air bag failed to inflate...

...How does that restrict his free speech...

...maybe my friends can do for me what Simon’s friends did for him...

...The loyalty he demanded was not slavish...

...The British require such space because of their experience with the Manchester crash...

...You may have noticed that, after arguing against a ground war in the Gulf in my preceding five columns, 1 made no mention of the matter last month...

...The report warned that “the District’s police department faces devastating manpower reductions . . . at a time when serious crime is at an alltime high...

...The reason is that I realized that the antiground war movement had turned into a pro-bombing one and that saving American lives by thoroughly “preparing” the battlefield was going to involve the slaughter of thousands of Iraqis...

...But as Carolyn Walker, the Senate majority whip, remarked, “We all have our prices...

...It also seemed possible that, once we had attained air supremacy over an enemy operating in the desert without natural cover, the moment could soon come when we might be able to win a quick ground victory at less loss of life to both sides than would be caused by continued bombing...

...Tilting at Windmills Did Barbara Boxer catch Dick Cheney...

...While I’m on this subject, 1 have another suggestion...

...and Mercedes-Benz were In putting together this issue, we often asked ourselves if we are being churlish, raining on the Gulf war’s victory parade...

...And there were feelings of letdown, just as you’d get when you left the Super Bowl game, even though you were happy to see your team slaughter the other team...

...Still, that said, I think those of us who are otherwise critical of the war must acknowledge that on the whole our military made an admirable effort to avoid inflicting civilian casualties...

...We did not use military force against Ferdinand Marcos...

...Here is another case where the ReaganBush administrations turned on an erstwhile pal...

...All they have to do is get Henry Kissinger to write a personal letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, who in turn will instruct his personal envoy to intervene on your behalf with whoever holds the keys to your cell...

...The revelation did not come as a total shock to us at the Monthly...

...He would support candidates whose integrity and devotion to the public interest he respected even if he disagreed with some of their views...

...For example, if Newsweek is right in saying that we knew the inhabited Baghdad building we bombed was a shelter, but we thought it was one for big shots and their families, then the briefers were a good deal less than candid about the episode...

...But again as with Saddam Hussein, I think we were wrong to launch a military attack...

...How many hours a week would you guess public employees are supposed to work...

...The stunning innocence of journalists when confronted by bureaucratic con games was never better illustrateci than in a television report by the usually savvy Gary Reals of WUSA-TV in Washington...

...You move over, thinking it must be the police or highway patrol...

...It will be the legislative sergeant at arms driving a lawmaker late, perhaps, for an appointment...

...He was a director of the bank while it was being used by Tony Boyle, the crooked president of the United Mine Workers (who was later convicted of ordering the murder of reformer Jock Yablonski), to steal money from the miners’ pension fund for the benefit of the union leadership...

...Poland then had the sixth largest army in the world, but it was quickly overrun because the Germans had better equipment and air supremacy...

...This led Rep...

...The CIA should secretly subsidize reruns of “L.A...

...Everyone knows that, despite whatever responsibility Chief Daryl F. Gates of the Los Angeles Police Department had for that brutal beating of the black man in March, he cannot be fired because he is a civil servant...

...1 am delighted to report that the Monthly’s 20-year campaign against lawyers (not all of them...

...G.E...

...Lucia Resort Strikes a Perfect Balance: A Luxury Spa Plunked Down in Island Paradise,” and other venues similarly suited to the earnest perusal of joint resolutions and conference committee reports...

...In Arizona, the House Judiciary chairman, Don Kenny, took a $55,000 cash bribe and stuffed it in his gym bag...

...The ACLU is helping congressional staff members fight a prohibition on honoraria for speaking engagements...

...The reform is so obvious from a commonsense standpoint that only a rigid conservative would dare waste time insisting on the analysis...

...Sure...

...All that is forbidden is for the lobby to give him a check for it...

...If that thought is a bit facetious, it does seem to me that one factor in the momentum toward war was that military action, in contrast to slow-moving embargos and diplomatic negotiations, was a great story like an earthquake or plane crash, only longer and better-a continually changing calamity that kept us glued to the set for weeks...

...No one is saying that a staff member should not be free to make such speeches-just that he should not be paid for them...

...A friend who recently visited Las Vegas tells me that its gaming establishments are packed with Japanese...

...L i f e is unfair, but it’s a good deal less unfair to the affluent and the well connected...

...That’s but one of the disturbing facts that emerge from a recent study of the postal service by the Cato Institute’s James Bovard...

...The problem is that once we went to the war option in January, thousands of casualties were inevitable, and the fact that 99 percent of them have turned out to be Iraqi is small comfort-all of which is why we were against the war, period, and continue to think it was a terrible idea...

...Still, we have a duty to tell the truth as we see it about this ugly, unnecessary war-no matter how out of step we might feel...

...Then all the bright young Japanese will desert productive enterprises to become lawyers and get laid...

...A Postal Inspection Service audit found properly addressed mail dumped in the trash at 76 As the government prepares its LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG case against Manuel Noriega, the CIA and the U.S...

...Suppose you were an average prisoner unfairly detained in some God-forsaken jail and read about the release of Bob Simon...

...When the police in Dalton, Georgia, ordered the Harvest Ministries shelter for the homeless to close because itdidn’t have a parking lot, Sheila Reed, the shelter’s director, pointed out that the homeless don’t have cars...

...as Michael Gambino told the personal injury lawyer that hiswife and son had recently been killed in a car accident...

...What’s wrong with that, ACLU...

...The justification for the trip, according to David A. Roberti, the senate president pro tem, was that the senators could learn to understand the problems that immigrants face when they arrive in California...

...1 can’t understand why people are so excited about our beating Iraq...

...Doesn’t this suggest there is some validity to the Monthly’s long-standing concern about the unaccountability of the civil service...

...it’s a great nation...

...Wushingtor7iun quotes the newest legal lion, Brendan Sullivan, justifying the lucrative fees he charges for helping such dubious clients as the manufacturers of adulterated children’s fruit juices escape liability...

...Remember the phone call from the Reagans that showed Marcos he was still being treated with dignity...

...You will find that the Sullivans and Dershowitzes tend to represent clients who either are rich or have cases that can endow their lawyer with celebrity, or else have claims against wellheeled individuals, corporations, or insurance companies, the proceeds from which will provide generous legal fees...

...There is not a hint in the story that the District has thousands of policemen who are not on the streets protecting the public, but sitting in offices or doing work of similarly marginal significance in the war against crime...

...It is easy to understand why the American people were angered by Jimmy Carter’s decision to withdraw from the 1980 Olympics and to impose a wheat embargo in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...He deprived them of the excitement of the games and ‘ instead offered the kind of diplomatic and economic sanctions that may avoid war but practically guarantee boredom...

...Gambino, of course, was never heard from again...

...Instead, we applied strong diplomatic pressure while talking to him in a way that showed we still remembered that we had once told him he was our friend...